I think my current view on the moral value of embryos is an extension of my views on the moral worth of fetuses and the morality of abortion. I think abortion becomes worse and worse as the pregnancy goes on because the fetus comes to more and more closely resemble a human.
At the stage of an embryo, there’s just not much that appears to me as “human” about an embryo that I would recognize as having moral value. There is potential, sure. but there is also potential in a human egg, and very few people consider an egg to have moral personhood.
To really posit otherwise, you almost have to believe in souls, or some other kind of binary identifier of personhood that comes into existence at a discreet point in time.
It’s probably worth noting that Catholics themselves don’t seem to have a universally shared view on the question of when exactly ensoulment happens. Theologians like Robert George seem to have settled on “fertilization”, but others like Thomas Aquinas seem to have believed that it occurs later, perhaps at implantation or when an embryo develops sufficient biological organization.
Maybe this is all besides the point. It probably doesn’t matter that much what Aquinas thought if you yourself believe that ensoulment begins at fertilization.
I suppose (though the above argument does not rely on it) that you want “Superbabies” to align artificial superintelligence and thus save the world, and that this accounts for your urgency, without which there would not be even an insufficient defense for what is proposed here (at least, not from a Catholic perspective).
I suppose if I thought genetically enhanced humans were the only way to save the world, I might consider it to be “worth it” even if I shared your ethics. But at the moment I think it’s quite unlikely the “superbabies” path will have enough time to pay off before someone creates digital superintelligence. And I don’t think we are doomed with certainty by default.
My real belief is that embryos don’t have moral weight beyond their potential to become a child someday. So to answer your question:
Do you believe that you are different from historical case studies in overreach, because you have a better understanding of science, or of morality, or because you have a better cause (supposed by me to be aligning superintelligence), or because your actions really are different?
Yes, I do think I have better morality than those who participated in cases of historical overreach. I certainly still have my flaws, but when I think about cases where I am likely to be failing morally, my mind goes to eating factory farmed meat first rather than to discarding embryos.
There is perhaps a chance I am nonetheless wrong. I’ve written up a proposal on how to do “Pro-Life” IVF better that I think someone of your moral persuasion should probably try to implement in IVF.
Personally, I have never found this line of thinking particularly compelling. An embryo, as created in IVF, is a ball of about 100 stem cells. It has no heart, no brain, and no circulatory system to speak of. It doesn’t even have a digestive tract. There is little to distinguish it from any other random clump of cells other than its unique DNA and its potential to become a person if implanted in a receptive uterus.
Some people might believe those two facts alone means an embryo already qualifies as a human. But I view implanting the embryo the same way I view having sex; it’s a necessary part of the process of procreation, and you don’t get a baby without it.
I see the appeal of the idea that implantation is required for personhood—as far as I know, the embryo will not activate its developmental program beyond a certain point without it.
But this makes sense for the embryo—without implantation (again, as far as I know) the embryo cannot gain mass. Trying to develop further without implantation would be utterly futile.
I see the dependency of an infant as analogous, though admittedly less extreme. An infant without breast milk or a reasonable substitute will starve, and you will never see the later parts of its developmental program. It would be a mistake to see the infant as only potentially human, and I believe it would be a mistake with the embryo as well.
I believe the example of IVF to be inherently pathological, but I will use it here. An IVF embryo (correct me if I am wrong) has largely the same developmental trajectory whichever woman it is implanted into, provided that the pregnancy is successful. Nearly as much as identical twins normally resemble each other, the infants resulting from implanting an identical pair of embryos into different women would resemble each other. Hence implantation, though essential, does not determine identity in the way that which sperm cell fertilizes an egg determines identity. And I think that continuity of identity is a reasonable basis for assessing human personhood.
I think my current view on the moral value of embryos is an extension of my views on the moral worth of fetuses and the morality of abortion. I think abortion becomes worse and worse as the pregnancy goes on because the fetus comes to more and more closely resemble a human.
At the stage of an embryo, there’s just not much that appears to me as “human” about an embryo that I would recognize as having moral value. There is potential, sure. but there is also potential in a human egg, and very few people consider an egg to have moral personhood.
To really posit otherwise, you almost have to believe in souls, or some other kind of binary identifier of personhood that comes into existence at a discreet point in time.
It’s probably worth noting that Catholics themselves don’t seem to have a universally shared view on the question of when exactly ensoulment happens. Theologians like Robert George seem to have settled on “fertilization”, but others like Thomas Aquinas seem to have believed that it occurs later, perhaps at implantation or when an embryo develops sufficient biological organization.
Maybe this is all besides the point. It probably doesn’t matter that much what Aquinas thought if you yourself believe that ensoulment begins at fertilization.
I suppose if I thought genetically enhanced humans were the only way to save the world, I might consider it to be “worth it” even if I shared your ethics. But at the moment I think it’s quite unlikely the “superbabies” path will have enough time to pay off before someone creates digital superintelligence. And I don’t think we are doomed with certainty by default.
My real belief is that embryos don’t have moral weight beyond their potential to become a child someday. So to answer your question:
Yes, I do think I have better morality than those who participated in cases of historical overreach. I certainly still have my flaws, but when I think about cases where I am likely to be failing morally, my mind goes to eating factory farmed meat first rather than to discarding embryos.
There is perhaps a chance I am nonetheless wrong. I’ve written up a proposal on how to do “Pro-Life” IVF better that I think someone of your moral persuasion should probably try to implement in IVF.
Thanks for your reply.
From the linked proposal:
I see the appeal of the idea that implantation is required for personhood—as far as I know, the embryo will not activate its developmental program beyond a certain point without it.
But this makes sense for the embryo—without implantation (again, as far as I know) the embryo cannot gain mass. Trying to develop further without implantation would be utterly futile.
I see the dependency of an infant as analogous, though admittedly less extreme. An infant without breast milk or a reasonable substitute will starve, and you will never see the later parts of its developmental program. It would be a mistake to see the infant as only potentially human, and I believe it would be a mistake with the embryo as well.
I believe the example of IVF to be inherently pathological, but I will use it here. An IVF embryo (correct me if I am wrong) has largely the same developmental trajectory whichever woman it is implanted into, provided that the pregnancy is successful. Nearly as much as identical twins normally resemble each other, the infants resulting from implanting an identical pair of embryos into different women would resemble each other. Hence implantation, though essential, does not determine identity in the way that which sperm cell fertilizes an egg determines identity. And I think that continuity of identity is a reasonable basis for assessing human personhood.