DxE comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Lukas_Gloor 28 July 2013 06:24PM

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Comment author: DxE 29 July 2013 09:09:14PM 4 points [-]

My sperm has the potential to become human. When I realized almost all of them were dying because of my continued existence, I decided that I will have to kill myself. It was the only rational thing to do.

Comment author: Vaniver 29 July 2013 11:58:58PM 1 point [-]

My sperm has the potential to become human.

It seems to me there is a significant difference between requiring an oocyte to become a person and requiring sustenance to become a person. I think about half of zygotes survive the pregnancy process, but almost all sperm don't turn into people.

Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 30 July 2013 12:11:28AM 4 points [-]

Would this difference disappear if we developed the technology to turn millions of sperm cells into babies?

Comment author: dspeyer 05 August 2013 02:29:31AM 0 points [-]

Doesn't our current cloning technology allow us to turn any ordinary cell into a baby, albeit one with aging-related diseases?

Comment author: Vaniver 30 July 2013 01:48:13AM 0 points [-]

Would this difference disappear if we developed the technology to turn millions of sperm cells into babies?

Probably, but in such a world, I don't think human life would be scarce, and I think that the value of human life would plummet accordingly. They would still represent a significant time and capital investment, and so be more valuable than the em case, but I think that people would be seen as much more replaceable.

It is possible that human reproduction is horrible by many moral standards which seem reasonable. I think it's more convenient to jettison those moral standards than reshape reproduction, but one could imagine a world where people were castrated / had oophorectomies to prevent gamete production, with reproduction done digitally from sequenced genomes. It does not seem obviously worse than our world, except that it seems like a lot of work for minimal benefit.