It seems to me that you are taking a very profound ethical stance when you argue for sacrificing a few for the benefit of the many. You are putting forth a very pragmatic view of ethis where someone gets to decide who will live and who will die based on the "over all good" of the group. Based on your ethical presuppositions, since there are many people who are dying of hunger in the world why not wipe out a few hundred million of the people who are eating too much in order to free up more resources for the rest of the population who needs it? I will grant you that some of the people that we will have to sacrifice are in my phone book, probably have opinions on many things (some may even be similar to yours), and have probably done plenty of things. But, since we are talking pragmatically, perhaps we can lower our standards on what constitutes a person worth keeping and a person worth killing if we could perhaps benefit the population as a whole.
Perhaps, you should care what a person's ethical or religious beliefs are when deciding on a subject such as when life starts. Otherwise we would have people like you deciding who lives and who dies based on pragmatic assumptions that could "justify" just about anything based on what they thought was "good" and "beneficial" to the group as a whole. If you are so enthusiastic about sacrificing people for medical research for the good of the whole, why don't you start with yourself and let other people make that decision for themselves.
I had the opportunity to speak with someone who has spent the last 35 years in a developing 3rd world country. I asked her what she thought about the OLPC and her response was that it might be putting the cart before the horse. Many of the children in these countries are so malnourished during the key developmental years they might not have developed the cognitive ability for the critical thinking skills necessary to benefit from a project like OLPC i.e. you can only ask What? but never Why? Additionally, the technology that is already present in these countries tends to break and lack the proper facilities to repair it.
It is completely incredible to me that you could charge every believer as lacking of a spirit of scientific inquiry. Science would be absolutely impossible without the sort of metaphysical presuppositions that Christianity holds to. I challenge any atheistic/agnostic scientist to justify their use of empiricism without using circular reasoning. This they will not be able to do and in the end will be making a metaphysical commitment to empiricism.
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It seems to me that you are taking a very profound ethical stance when you argue for sacrificing a few for the benefit of the many. You are putting forth a very pragmatic view of ethis where someone gets to decide who will live and who will die based on the "over all good" of the group. Based on your ethical presuppositions, since there are many people who are dying of hunger in the world why not wipe out a few hundred million of the people who are eating too much in order to free up more resources for the rest of the population who needs it? I will grant you that some of the people that we will have to sacrifice are in my phone book, probably have opinions on many things (some may even be similar to yours), and have probably done plenty of things. But, since we are talking pragmatically, perhaps we can lower our standards on what constitutes a person worth keeping and a person worth killing if we could perhaps benefit the population as a whole. Perhaps, you should care what a person's ethical or religious beliefs are when deciding on a subject such as when life starts. Otherwise we would have people like you deciding who lives and who dies based on pragmatic assumptions that could "justify" just about anything based on what they thought was "good" and "beneficial" to the group as a whole. If you are so enthusiastic about sacrificing people for medical research for the good of the whole, why don't you start with yourself and let other people make that decision for themselves.
I had the opportunity to speak with someone who has spent the last 35 years in a developing 3rd world country. I asked her what she thought about the OLPC and her response was that it might be putting the cart before the horse. Many of the children in these countries are so malnourished during the key developmental years they might not have developed the cognitive ability for the critical thinking skills necessary to benefit from a project like OLPC i.e. you can only ask What? but never Why? Additionally, the technology that is already present in these countries tends to break and lack the proper facilities to repair it.
It is completely incredible to me that you could charge every believer as lacking of a spirit of scientific inquiry. Science would be absolutely impossible without the sort of metaphysical presuppositions that Christianity holds to. I challenge any atheistic/agnostic scientist to justify their use of empiricism without using circular reasoning. This they will not be able to do and in the end will be making a metaphysical commitment to empiricism.