I appreciate the pursuit of non-strawman understandings of misgivings around reprogenetics, and the pursuit of addressing them.
I don’t feel I understand the people who talk about embryo selection as “killing embryos” or “choosing who lives and dies”, but I want to and have tried, so I’ll throw some thoughts into the mix.
Hart, IIUC, argues that wanting to choose who will live and who won’t means you’re evil and therefore shouldn’t be making such choices. I think his argument is ultimately stupid, so maybe I still don’t get it. But anyway, I think it’s an importantly different sort of argument than the two you present. It’s an indictment of the character of the choosers.
Second: When I tried to empathize with “life/soul starts at conception”, what I got was:
We want a simple boundary…
… for political purposes, to prevent…
child sacrifice (which could make sense given the cults around the time of the birth of Christianity?).
killing mid-term fetuses, which might actually for real start to have souls.
… for social purposes, because it causes damage to ….
the would-be parents’s souls to abort the thing which they do, or should, think of as having a soul.
the social norm / consensus / coordination around not killing things that people do or should orient towards as though they have souls.
The pope said so. (...But then I’d like to understand why the pope said so, which would take more research.) (Something I said to a twitter-famous Catholic somehow caused him to seriously consider that, since Yermiahu says that god says “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you...”, maybe it’s ok to discard embryos before implantation...)
(My invented explanation:) Souls are transpersonal. They are a distributed computation between the child, the parents, the village, society at large, and humanity throughout all time (god). As an embryo grows, the computation is, gradually, “handed off to / centralized in” the physical locus of the child. But already upon conception, the parents are oriented towards the future existence of the child, and are computing their part of the child’s soul—which is most of what has currently manifested of the child’s soul. In this way, we get:
From a certain perspective:
It reflects poorly on would-be parents who decide to abort.
It makes sense for the state to get involved to prevent abortion. (I don’t agree with this, but hear me out:)
The perspective is one which does not acknowledge the possibility of would-be parents not mentally and socially orienting to a pregnancy in the same way that parents orient when they are intending to have children, or at least open to it and ready to get ready for it.
...Which is ultimately stupid of course, because that is a possibility. So maybe this is still a strawman.
Well, maybe the perspective is that it’s possible but bad, which is at least usefully a different claim.
Within my invented explanation, the “continuous distributed metaphysics of the origins of souls”, it is indeed the case that the soul starts at conception—BUT in fact it’s fine to swap embryos! It’s actually a strange biodeterminism to say that this clump of cells or that, or this genome or that, makes the person. A soul is not a clump of cells or a genome! The soul is the niche that the parents, and the village, have already begun constructing for the child; and, a little bit, the soul is the structure of all humanity (e.g. the heritage of concepts and language; the protection of rights; etc.).
I appreciate the pursuit of non-strawman understandings of misgivings around reprogenetics, and the pursuit of addressing them.
I don’t feel I understand the people who talk about embryo selection as “killing embryos” or “choosing who lives and dies”, but I want to and have tried, so I’ll throw some thoughts into the mix.
First: Maybe take a look at: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-anti-theology-of-the-body
Hart, IIUC, argues that wanting to choose who will live and who won’t means you’re evil and therefore shouldn’t be making such choices. I think his argument is ultimately stupid, so maybe I still don’t get it. But anyway, I think it’s an importantly different sort of argument than the two you present. It’s an indictment of the character of the choosers.
Second: When I tried to empathize with “life/soul starts at conception”, what I got was:
We want a simple boundary…
… for political purposes, to prevent…
child sacrifice (which could make sense given the cults around the time of the birth of Christianity?).
killing mid-term fetuses, which might actually for real start to have souls.
… for social purposes, because it causes damage to ….
the would-be parents’s souls to abort the thing which they do, or should, think of as having a soul.
the social norm / consensus / coordination around not killing things that people do or should orient towards as though they have souls.
The pope said so. (...But then I’d like to understand why the pope said so, which would take more research.) (Something I said to a twitter-famous Catholic somehow caused him to seriously consider that, since Yermiahu says that god says “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you...”, maybe it’s ok to discard embryos before implantation...)
(My invented explanation:) Souls are transpersonal. They are a distributed computation between the child, the parents, the village, society at large, and humanity throughout all time (god). As an embryo grows, the computation is, gradually, “handed off to / centralized in” the physical locus of the child. But already upon conception, the parents are oriented towards the future existence of the child, and are computing their part of the child’s soul—which is most of what has currently manifested of the child’s soul. In this way, we get:
From a certain perspective:
It reflects poorly on would-be parents who decide to abort.
It makes sense for the state to get involved to prevent abortion. (I don’t agree with this, but hear me out:)
The perspective is one which does not acknowledge the possibility of would-be parents not mentally and socially orienting to a pregnancy in the same way that parents orient when they are intending to have children, or at least open to it and ready to get ready for it.
...Which is ultimately stupid of course, because that is a possibility. So maybe this is still a strawman.
Well, maybe the perspective is that it’s possible but bad, which is at least usefully a different claim.
Within my invented explanation, the “continuous distributed metaphysics of the origins of souls”, it is indeed the case that the soul starts at conception—BUT in fact it’s fine to swap embryos! It’s actually a strange biodeterminism to say that this clump of cells or that, or this genome or that, makes the person. A soul is not a clump of cells or a genome! The soul is the niche that the parents, and the village, have already begun constructing for the child; and, a little bit, the soul is the structure of all humanity (e.g. the heritage of concepts and language; the protection of rights; etc.).