TheAgitator.com
Weekend Ethics Question
Sunday, February 15th, 2009From a New York Times article on the Neanderthal genome:
Possessing the Neanderthal genome raises the possibility of bringing Neanderthals back to life. Dr. George Church, a leading genome researcher at the Harvard Medical School, said Thursday that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million.
I don’t mean to get all Leon Kass here, but this feels creepy. I’d be the first to sign up for, say, a woolly mammoth rides. But while it would certainly be interesting to see and interact with one, bringing back a Neanderthal raises some ethical questions.
I think there’s a variation of the uncanny valley at play, here. Neanderthals are awfully close to humans. Keeping one in a cage or lab for our amusement or understanding just doesn’t sound right.
What rights would Neanderthal Man have? Certainly more than a woolly mammoth, right? Would he simply become the property of the lab that cloned him? Would they be free to perform whatever tests on him they pleased? How human would a clone of an extinct member of the hominina tribe need to be to have the same rights as the rest of us?
Even assuming he would have the same rights as anyone else, is it ethical to bring him back if he’ll be the only member of his species alive? Seems like a pretty horrible existence. Would he be allowed to mate with human beings (I’m just assuming he’d have groupies). Would we let him end his life if he wanted to? What if he had no interest in allowing himself to be used to better our understanding of Neanderthals?
Most importantly, would they let him go to law school?
People shouldn’t play God.
Look how badly things turned out when I tried…
When you consider some of the people that have gone to law school, maybe a Neanderthal would be an improvement.
I vote we don’t bring him back. In the game of survival-of-the-fittest, we won. I see no reason for a rematch.
Perhaps a job in law enforcement and maybe even a spot on the SWAT team.
Your comment makes me wonder if they already brought Neanderthals back years ago.
I don’t see an ethical dilemma at all.
If you create a sentient being, either through cloning, engineering, or just good ‘ol procreation, it has the rights afforded it by law. Under current law, those rights would start when the new Neanderthal is decanted, and ramp up until it’s 21st birthday.
Look at it this way: Slavery is slavery. It doesn’t matter where the victim came from.
If you attempt to enact legislation declaring cloned or designed beings as ‘property’, you should expect to run afoul of the existing laws against slavery.
From the article–”To avoid ethical problems, this genome would be inserted not into a human cell but into a chimpanzee cell. The chimp cell would be reprogrammed to embryonic state and used to generate, in a chimpanzee’s womb, a mutant chimp embryo that was a Neanderthal in many or most of its features.”
-Ahhh, a retarded monkey-human. Deal me in.
The core of the problem here is that we don’t really know how intelligent a cloned Neanderthal would be. Probably much smarter than the great apes (which we–rightly or wrongly–do keep in cages), but potentially nowhere near intelligent enough to exist in modern human society. What if the typical Neanderthal ends up being a very strong, very temperamental person with the reasoning of a 4-year old?
What we do know is that they were very social animals, like other primates (including us.) I do think that in any case it would be unethical to clone only one, for this reason.
Why should the cloned Neanderthal have rights when the rest of us don’t?
I think we should make a dozen or so. Then we could have a basketball team.
Why “he”? Why not “she”?
Well, I for one don’t see why the neanderthal shouldn’t go to law school. My hope is that he could set an excellent example as an informed, capable and educated prosecutor.
Why don’t we just clone Phil Hartman and call it even?
We don’t have rights because we are *human*, we have rights because we think. How “human” a newborn Neanderthal would be isn’t really the determining factor as to whether they should be recognized as being a self-aware, freely acting individual.
I think, broadly, we can basically sum up how a Neanderthal would be treated by comparing its degree of self-aware individual autonomy to one of the three already existing legal categories. A Neanderthal would either be a 1) self-responsible adult individual, 2) a mentally incompetent person, or 3) an animal. The dividing line between 1 and 2 would be whether or not the Neanderthal was intelligent and functional enough to take care of itself in our society and not be a danger to others, while the dividing line between 2 and 3 would the presence of advanced mental faculties which are currently unique to humans.
I don’t know much about how intelligent Neanderthals were, but it’s my poorly informed understanding that they did have a primitive society, including graves which indicate some kind of religious/mystical belief in an afterlife and the ability to plan and engage in group endeavors. So I imagine they’d be much closer to the dividing line between 1 and 2 than anything that we would honestly be able to treat as an animal (and thus property) for long.
/cue GEICO jokes
If scientist could do this–recreate an actual Neanderthal. And I don’t really believe that they can. I’d bet the Neanderthal, raised in our society, wouldn’t be much different from us mentally, though probably afflicted with any number of learning disabilities. Chances are we could probably reproduce with it, which would make us the same species, right? If there’s a more sound biological definition of species, please, I’d really like to hear it.
Dave Krueger says: “I vote we don’t bring him back. In the game of survival-of-the-fittest, we won. I see no reason for a rematch.”
Let’s not be too hasty. I think there may have been some serious cheating going on then. Where were the referees? In a longer term match, we may exterminate ourselves, and Neanderthals, if less vicious and belligerent, might have survived longer. And how can anyone be certain they were less intelligent?
B says: “The core of the problem here is that we don’t really know how intelligent a cloned Neanderthal would be. Probably much smarter than the great apes…”
But perhaps more intelligent? Brain size is not necessarily a predictor of intelligence (but seems correlated); I think I read recently that language ability is being traced now on the basis of a single gene. We are 99% the same as chimps and pigs as I recall. Maybe after more is understood about the functional operation of genomes we might be in a better position to evaluate the consequences of recreating extinct species.
What we’re talking about here is cloning a dumb ugly guy…or girl, sorry.
#17-Robin–You’re an ignorant bastard.
It will be a living breathing Geico spokesman.
Just as an aside, this has been explored in the literary sphere in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. In this world there is quite a market for cloned extinct species. Neanderthals, or just Thals, have their own communities but are second class citizens. You can also buy cloned Dodo birds and jump in and out of books, thank the GSD. Not deep works, but worth a quick read on your next long flight.
Nobody reads the classics anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy
It’s also similar to what Nadya Suleman did with her octuplets. Reproduction and creating new life are not entirely within the prerogative of individuals because they have an incredible impact on the rights of another individual in way that no other social arrangement has. To some modest extent, society has a natural right to regulate reproduction and the creation of new life to prevent people from playing God or reproducing so many times that their kids end up in a position where the family has not one chance in hell of supporting them on its own resources.
I think the only way that it could be conceivably moral to bring back the neanderthals would be if the scientists were willing to create them in sufficient numbers that they would have enough of their own kind to form a normal life with.
They would make lovely butlers.
Why are we messing around with a wannabe? Let’s bring back the real FDR.
Am I the only one here who thinks it would be wicked cool to be able to see a real live Neanderthal? Sure it’s incredibly selfish (and arguable unethical)…but man, how neat would it be to see and interact with a neanderthal. I’d certainly hope him/her would have full rights as a human, free will and rights to life, liberty and happiness, and hopefully an adopted human family (as opposed to being locked up in a science lab). Well, one thing is for sure, if scientists did clone one, it would probably not be very PC to refer to him/her as “cave man/woman”
A related question (and one I think much more relevant to our not too distant future) is that of the machines we use. Every year we get closer to true artificial intelligence. My understanding is that some programs are already fairly close to passing the Turing test. At what point do the same ethical questions posed above come into play? In some ways the questions are much trickier than for a reborn Neanderthal. After all, if I program a sentient machine to enjoy working for me, is that slavery or just providing a fulfilling life for my creation?
Didn’t Encino Man already answer all of these questions? I think we would need Pauly Shore on hand if this went forward.
“To some modest extent, society has a natural right to regulate reproduction and the creation of new life to prevent people from playing God”
Um… what? “Society” has no such “right.” What does “playing God” even mean? If “society” has the “right” to forcibly prevent people from reproducing, are you seriously advocating, say, society’s right to forcibly sterilize people? To lock them up so they can’t reproduce? “Society” can stay the hell out of my bedroom, thanks!
I think it would be great to have someone other than illegals to mow my lawn, clean my house … bring back slavery to go along with the reimposition of serfdom we have now.
I wonder if they can be toilet trained? Hummm?
From the NYT piece,
Heh. At first, I read that and thought, “Yeah, ethical questions, blah, blah.” Then, I noticed that it was written in sort of a funny way, such that Dr. Klein of Stanford might be implying there wasn’t much difference between Harvard and a zoo. :)
On the ethics of this, I have issues with very deliberately bringing a thinking being into the world, knowing beforehand that it will be isolated, it may be ill-equipped to deal with life among us and won’t have a social infrastructure designed to help it, it may be subject to scientific prodding and social scorn, and may very likely die of diseases of its own that we have no means to treat or of our diseases for which it may have no natural immunity. This isn’t an accidentally (or even deliberately) conceived human child that may start out disadvantaged, but which would then have his given chance for self-determination and a happy life. This would be someone brought into the world with little reasonable expectation of normalcy, and done to satisfy our curiosity.
That all being said, I agree with others that, once s/he were here, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch for our system of rights to accommodate. Sentient creatures should have full rights unless demonstrable diminished capacity makes them unable to respect the rights of others, just the same as for Homo sapiens sapiens.
I just hope s/he doesn’t run for Congress. We don’t need someone in office who can vote for trillion dollar programs without even being able to understand (or even write) a number that large. Oops. Too late!
I don’t think that a cloned Neanderthal would be a “real” Neanderthal any more than a person cloned from ancient Cro-Magnon DNA would be a “real” Cro-Magnon. They would merely be humans with DNA slightly different from ours, the Cro-Magnon’s less so than the Neanderthal’s. Of course they would have the same rights as the rest of us. They might or might not be able to function easily in modern society. They might, for example, be very vulnerable to our diseases, and the Neanderthal’s speech apparatus might not be capable of the degree of articulation as ours. I say they would not be “real” because what makes us “us” isn’t so much our DNA as how we function together as social animals. And both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon societies are long-gone.
“I have issues with very deliberately bringing a thinking being into the world, knowing beforehand that it will be isolated, it may be ill-equipped to deal with life among us and won’t have a social infrastructure designed to help it, it may be subject to scientific prodding and social scorn, and may very likely die of diseases of its own that we have no means to treat or of our diseases for which it may have no natural immunity.”
Holy shit man, you just described my life!
Mommy ….
“Of course they would have the same rights as the rest of us.”
Some might say “lack of rights.”
:)
I think I was married to one of these.
‘B’ said:
“What if the typical Neanderthal ends up being a very strong, very temperamental person with the reasoning of a 4-year old?”
Hmmmmm… Politics, maybe?
If you’ve seen the Hare Club for Men episode of South Park (Christ leaves a rabbit in charge of the church), you immediately realize the potential benefits of Neanderthals practicing law and holding elected office.
Wouldn’t he just live with a family like ‘Alf’ ?
Society has every right to prevent you from abusing your reproductive rights in obviously psychotic ways like having 14 kids by in vitro fertilization when you are on welfare. If you are going to start claiming natural law rights here, then you have no standing because natural law tradition recognizes a great deal of limitations on parental freedom for the sake of protecting children. If you are going to claim some sort of positivist view of rights, then I can just assert that you have no rights either because you can no more prove your rights than I can prove society has any collective authority under that model.
If you don’t understand what this means, then you should recuse yourself from any discussion about biology, especially bioethics.
I’m saying that society has the right to set reasonable limits like prohibiting a woman from continuously getting herself pregnant while on welfare, going so far as to give her an ultimatum: stop having children or all of yours will be put up for adoption.
Ah, the typical borderline sociopathic libertarian response: my rights, only my rights, the only thing that matters are my unfettered rights to do whatever I want, whenever I want, without giving a flying fuck how I hurt anyone else.
I mean, you can’t prove that neglecting your children is harming them or initiating force against them. Therefore, clearly you aren’t harming your children by breeding so well beyond your financial limits that you can’t even often afford to feed them bulk quantities of ramen.
I’m against it because they would take our jobs.
#1, 7:
“God, schmod! I want my monkey man!”–Bart Simpson