There are tens of thousands of American servicemen in Japan. Their crime rate is typical of that of men their age. Simple math, however, leads to "constant raping, murding and accidently running over", just because of the large number of people you are talking about.
The only difference is that the media in Japan squeals ten times as much when a gaijin commits a crime as when a native Japanese does the same. In short, you are falling for Japanese bigotry. There is a reason we "hardly ever hear about it" - because it is perfectly normal!
If you don't understand why, here is an example:
There's more: African-Americans/Hispanics/soccer-dads are constantly raping, murdering, and accidentally running over Alabama citizens, but we hardly ever hear about that.
You can do far more good for the world (either for the environment or for human health and welfare) with the $3000 you blew on having a fancy badge for your goodness.
Approximatly 90% of people who are in the top 1% of wealth today did not have parents who were in the top 1%. Income mobility is extreme in the US.
Having grown up in a dirt-poor rural area, I know for a fact that the vast majority of poor people who are there are there precisely because of decisions they have made. Luck has little to do with it. Same is true on the other end. I have yet to meet a smart, hard-working poor person (well, except grad students and post docs, but that is another story).
Here is an example from the chemical industry, which I am a member of. In chemistry, a vastly disproportionate share of R&D goes to high-value added, low-volume products. However, most of the revenue and profit comes from low-tech, high volume products. For example, the major petro companies are often listed as among the top chemical companies if you use revenue as your only criteria. Why? Because they distill a gigantic amount of raw chemicals out of petroleum before the send the rest to be burned. However, the petro companies have far, far fewer chemists working for them as compared to a real chemical company such as Dow or Dupont.
Then, even within a company such as Dow and Dupont, most of the revenue (not necessarily profit) comes from selling things like bulk polymers or industrial grade chemicals. This is not where the bulk of R&D lies, however.
In short, there is no way for a bureaucrat to judge who is doing how much research or how valuable it is.
They are speculating so far out that it would be something like Grover Cleveland trying to pass regulations on solar power generators.
There is no reason to be worrying about technologies that are many decades in the future, outside of the pure fun of idle speculation. Taking yourself seriously, though, probably means you have a screw loose or three.
for $2000 you can do the enviroment far more good in less flashy ways. How about:
1: Donating the money to the Nature Conservatory (the best in the biz)
2: Investing in home technologies such as better insulation or solar water heat. If you already have those, save a few more years and get yourself a geothermal unit.
3: Use the money to buy vehicle carbon credits and/or green electricity.
Of course, merely owning a Prius means you are ignoring the better environmental alternatives out there. Owning a Prius means you want to show that you care about the environment - not that you really do. Unfortunately, you can't really show your well-insulated attic off to your friends and coworkers.
I will leave you to do the research. In any case, it is far too soon to judge the results of this war. If Iraq is a worse place in 2013 than it was in 2003, I will eat your dirty underpants. You want to make the reverse promise?
In general, drastic changes in policy are not a good idea. With respect to abortion, I would advocate slowly tightening the restrictions as we slowly convince people that it is wrong. The fraction of people opposed to abortion is growing. Indeed, only 40% of people believe most abortions to be moral. Only in the exceptional cases (rape, mother's health, diseased fetus, etc do majorities support abortion (around 80%). Most studies conflate these two and find that majorities support abortion rights, even though most people are against 99% of abortions.
As for women's rights, there is no disagreement so what is there to discuss? I am quite sure that I am likely to grant women more rights than you. However, if the fetus is a person, its rights win. No one, whether male for female, has the right to kill an innocent person. If the fetus is not a person, then it is clearly a woman and her rights vs a hunk of meat, and she wins.
In short, people disagree about the fetus. They do not disagree about women. I generally feel that if people start talking about the woman's rights, it is because they tire of being forced to argue that a living human being is property that has fewer rights than a farm animal. Therefore, they switch to arguing a point where they are correct, but virtually no one disagrees.
In general, I think treating animals well is similar to good samaratanism - something we should expect of other people, shun them if they fail to do, but not enforce by law. I definitely do not consider animals on the same level as humans, though I do support voluntary efforts to improve the conditions of farm animals, especially hogs and chickens. Cows generally have it a bit better.
Unfortunately, there seems to be two extremes in this matter. First, there is the "do it cheap crowd" with only minimal standards enforced by law. Second is the whacky enviro left, which while pushing for decent standards for animal treatment, lumps it with all sorts of anti-science such as pathological fears of chemicals or anything "unnatural". This drives up the price too much. People like me, who would be willing to pay a bit more for meat raised humanely, are stuck either conceding the cruel practices or pay double to endulge someone else's irrationality. I have a couple of friends who are PETA types and I have tried to convince them that there are lots of people like me who could be swayed by voluntary standards, but these friends tend to be all or nothing types.
As for hunting, I simply consider it part of proper game management. It is a complete falsehood to believe that nature is in some sort of "balance" or is optimal without human interference. This is especially false given that we have dramatically reduced predator populations, causing animals such as deer and rabbits to wreak havoc. Excepting a few idiots, most hunters I know are very knowledgable about the game they hunt and care deeply about the population's health and habitat.
Why are women any more likely to be able to decide the ethics of human life than men? Actually, you could make the reverse argument - they have more self-interest in the matter than men, and therefore their opinion is more likely to be biased in their own favor.
I have slaughtered a number of animals over the years. I do not consider it cruel at all. Why? Because I compare it to reality. If I were a deer, I would want to die by a hunter's gun. The alternatives generally consist of some combination of starving, disease, and getting eaten alive. I'd prefer the bullet.
I guess I am not sure what you mean by cruel. Do you mean "causing physical pain and/or mental anguish"? In that case, I do not think cruel is synonomous with either unjust or immoral. If I poisoned you in your sleep to night, would that be cruel? You would never know what you were missing and would not feel a thing. Wouldn't this be an example of immoral but not cruel?
I love how your blog claims "socially adjusted" when you enter a discussion with the word "fucking". You are an interesting exercise in irony.
All lives should be treated equally. No society currently does this nor does any mainstream party advocate its consequences.
"It has been pointed out before that the sheer drop in crime rates beginning in the 1990's is attributable in large part to the drop in the segment of the population most likely to commit violent crime. I.e., a considerable majority of the abortions permitted by Roe v. Wade prevented the births of future killers."
True, abortion has likely lowered the crime rates. The problem is that you have saved 100,000 murders by committing 30,000,000 abortions. That argument clearly does not satisfy the "all lives are equal" premise.
How about quality of life? Should we err more on the side of protecting life even if the quality of it will be drastically lower for the mother, and thus necessarily for the would-be child, who will grow up to be an adult with considerably less to be happy about than a parent who is actually *prepared* to properly administer the life of another human being?
While the mother's loss could be drastic, I find it highly implausible (indeed, nearly logically impossible) that her loss could be greater than the fetus's.
Do we err on the side of protecting "life", no matter how ill-formed, or do we prevent misery of actual lives by cutting short those that are merely potential?
I consider it permissible to abort fetuses with severe birth defects, who will never be intelligent.
Which right is more unalienable? The right to life, or the right to the pursuit of happiness?
Obviously the former. You can't have liberty or happiness if you are dead.
I don't know the answer, but I note that the Declaration spoke of the rights of *men*. Not *potential*men*.
"Men" at the time, meant to most people "white males". I am glad we have expanded the definition. We should continue to do so.
FYI, I am not a Christian, nor have I made any argument here based on a religious premise, at least in the ordinary sense of the word.
While we will cure many of these diseases, doing so by using a method which requires sacrificing other humans is both immoral and unnecessary. There are lots of alternatives to and variations of stem-cell research that are unquestionably moral. There is no need to take the low road when we can take the high road to the same place, in about the same time. For example, it was recently demonstrated that we can pluck single cells from embryos (thereby not killing them) and use those to establish stem cell lines. There are still some technical and moral issues here but they are not insurmountable. The basic trick is that we have to wait long enough that the removed cell could not (under normal circumstances) develop on its own into a child, but not so late as to have too much differentiation and no possibility of establish stem-cell growth.
Approximately the same standard we use in law. Clearly, it is unjust to punish an innocent person. Clearly, it is unjust to not punish the guilty. Unfortunately, there is a trade off, and we set the error rate somewhere in this area.
With abortion, the numbers are not really much of an issue, for two reasons: first, before conception, the numbers are way to one side. After conception, they are way to the other. There is no mucking around in the grey area. Second, conception brings about a fundamental change in the entity, physically and morally. After this point, it is all grey and slippery slope. Any lines are arbitrarily drawn in the sand.
"actually, you're nice hypothetical question given by social economists is interesting because it depends on how much risk you are willing to take."
Yes, there is a certain level of reward that I would also make this gamble on - but it is quite large. How much would I have to pay you, right now, to take a 1/4 chance of dying? Logically, it would be at least a reward that provided a 33% increase in your future happiness. This is a pretty large reward. I do not think abortion makes the surviving humans 1/3 happier. I am not even sure it makes us much happier at all.
"a big hole in your argument is that unconscious, sleeping, or even people in many types of comas are thinking individuals. There are been people who remember things said to them in the room while in a coma. Dreams are instances of enhanced brain activity(and I've gotten an idea from one or two). unconscious people are in that same realm"
I agree that sleeping and unconcious people are having all sorts of brain activity, and that people in comas occasionally remember something. However, people in such situations are not intelligent in a manner that indicates rights. Can an unconcious person, for example, be "responsible"? Even if an unconcious person were to be held "responsible" for an action they committed while unconcious, we would normally assign the blame to what they did or did not do in preparation for this event.
There are few scenarios which I believe killing another human being (or other intelligent being) is justified. They all involve the same logic - that the killing will save more lives than it will take. War can be one of these situations. Self-defense is another. Unfortunately, there are still things worth fighting for.
And who I choose to help or how? In any case, I am not a hypocrite. There is no standard to which I hold anyone else that I do not hold myself to. Indeed, I hold myself to much more stringent standards. I would help the dying man in the desert and would expect you to do likewise. However, I never said that I expected you nor anyone else to make all possible positive sum trades, now did I?
"1) Your time spent on this calculation could have been spent in gainful employment."
Actually, I am at work. It's a slow day and I have lots of time. I can only read so many research articles in a day. But you do have a greater point. If I could find a way to donate this time to something more valuable, I would. However, I find value, both personal and for humanity, in making such posts and having these important discussions. For your information, most of my charity dollars go to exactly what you described.
"2) We live in a world that has exploded into a population of over 6 billion."
Birth rates are falling like a rock. Population will level off soon and then begin to fall. Most industrialized nations are facing a severe economic disaster if they don't get their birthrates up. The US is the best off of the bunch, fortunately, which is why you don't hear about it so much.
"Already we have more people than could be sustained at the current American's standard of living."
Technology will improve, drastically, long before that happens.
"We are already gearing up for big fights over remaining resources of energy (oil)"
We won't be burning oil in fifty years.
with other resources (potable water) to come. Unchecked, unrestrained growth will lead either to famine or war, and probably both.
Water is not an issue. Energy is. If you have energy, you have fresh water. People have been predicting the environmental apocalypse for decades. They have been wrong every time.
"b) a myopic focus on saving lives of local kids is inefficient, non-pragmatic, nationalist and borderline racist -- why so much time spent on saving an American embryo when that energy could save 100's of kids in Sudan?"
Let's follow that logic. All American social programs should be undone and the money spent in the third world. I am for it. Are you? Given that the government is going to take my money, it at least should spend it where it is needed most.
I am interested in why you think it is expensive to save local children. The ones I am currently talking about cost nothing to "save" - we are actually spending time and money to kill them.
are falling rapidly and generally well below replacement rates. Europe and many east-Asian countries are already under severe demographic stress due to the lack of children. Japan is already in population decline! It will not be long before this becomes a big issue in the states as well.
The choice of who has what rights when cannot be left to the choice of another (in this case, obviously biased) individual. On the contrary, this is one of the most important debates we must make as a society.
It would be a scary world where the whim of one person had the power to veto or discard the rights of another.
I have encountered a lot of different approaches to this question. "Potential matters" is the only one that I find consistent - by which I mean it does not lead me to conclusions that I am highly convinced are false.
As for "past matters", I agree that having a "past" is an additional consideration in favor of rights, but I find it neither necessary nor sufficient. The latter is more obvious. Terry Shaivo had a past, but no future. Most people agreed that she no longer had full rights. As for the former, I would offer the following hypothetical: If chickens were extremely intelligent (a big if, I know), could we still eat eggs? I would say no, and would fully support the armed chicken insurrection.
As for your AI question, I would say it occurs when the code is executed. Why? Because I believe there is another criteria for rights which I have not yet discussed - uniqueness. When talking about meat machines, this generally is not an issue as even identical twins are unique due to differences in other elements of their biochemistry. However, uniqueness is important for issues such as AI or borg/hive style hypothetical entities. Upon execution of an AI, it will begin to change, and therefore become unique and become worthy of rights.
Yes, we do have some sort of sliding scale for animal rights, which is based most irrationally on how cute and fuzzy they are. I am not particularly proud of these ethics. I do not believe animals have any rights, and we should use them as we see fit. In general, our interests align so this is not as bad as it sounds. Of course, we should not harm or torture them for no purpose. With respect to infants, yes, they are on the sliding scale, too. The question is when do they slide past the most important right of all - the right to their very life.
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There are tens of thousands of American servicemen in Japan. Their crime rate is typical of that of men their age. Simple math, however, leads to "constant raping, murding and accidently running over", just because of the large number of people you are talking about.
The only difference is that the media in Japan squeals ten times as much when a gaijin commits a crime as when a native Japanese does the same. In short, you are falling for Japanese bigotry. There is a reason we "hardly ever hear about it" - because it is perfectly normal!
If you don't understand why, here is an example:
There's more: African-Americans/Hispanics/soccer-dads are constantly raping, murdering, and accidentally running over Alabama citizens, but we hardly ever hear about that.
You can do far more good for the world (either for the environment or for human health and welfare) with the $3000 you blew on having a fancy badge for your goodness.
Approximatly 90% of people who are in the top 1% of wealth today did not have parents who were in the top 1%. Income mobility is extreme in the US.
Having grown up in a dirt-poor rural area, I know for a fact that the vast majority of poor people who are there are there precisely because of decisions they have made. Luck has little to do with it. Same is true on the other end. I have yet to meet a smart, hard-working poor person (well, except grad students and post docs, but that is another story).
Here is an example from the chemical industry, which I am a member of. In chemistry, a vastly disproportionate share of R&D goes to high-value added, low-volume products. However, most of the revenue and profit comes from low-tech, high volume products. For example, the major petro companies are often listed as among the top chemical companies if you use revenue as your only criteria. Why? Because they distill a gigantic amount of raw chemicals out of petroleum before the send the rest to be burned. However, the petro companies have far, far fewer chemists working for them as compared to a real chemical company such as Dow or Dupont.
Then, even within a company such as Dow and Dupont, most of the revenue (not necessarily profit) comes from selling things like bulk polymers or industrial grade chemicals. This is not where the bulk of R&D lies, however.
In short, there is no way for a bureaucrat to judge who is doing how much research or how valuable it is.
building self-replicating nanobots. Hell, get back to me when someone even demonstrates that it is even possible to do so in principle.
Including salary, benefits, equipment, facilities, and support staff. "Big Pharma" and the major chemical companies have thousands of PhDs eac.
Someone has to pay those salaries, or your drug wouldn't exist in the first place. It really is that simple.
They are speculating so far out that it would be something like Grover Cleveland trying to pass regulations on solar power generators.
There is no reason to be worrying about technologies that are many decades in the future, outside of the pure fun of idle speculation. Taking yourself seriously, though, probably means you have a screw loose or three.
Software patents may be a mess, but chemical ones are generally not.
Please don't assume the problems of software patents extend to all types. They don't.
If you vote Republican before you are 20, you have no heart. If you vote Democrat after you are 20, you have no brain.
All you are noting is that many people, somewhere along the line, realize that idealism doesn't actually work.
for $2000 you can do the enviroment far more good in less flashy ways. How about:
1: Donating the money to the Nature Conservatory (the best in the biz)
2: Investing in home technologies such as better insulation or solar water heat. If you already have those, save a few more years and get yourself a geothermal unit.
3: Use the money to buy vehicle carbon credits and/or green electricity.
Of course, merely owning a Prius means you are ignoring the better environmental alternatives out there. Owning a Prius means you want to show that you care about the environment - not that you really do. Unfortunately, you can't really show your well-insulated attic off to your friends and coworkers.
glorious economic history.
Two of your three items are wrong.
I will leave you to do the research. In any case, it is far too soon to judge the results of this war. If Iraq is a worse place in 2013 than it was in 2003, I will eat your dirty underpants. You want to make the reverse promise?
In general, drastic changes in policy are not a good idea. With respect to abortion, I would advocate slowly tightening the restrictions as we slowly convince people that it is wrong. The fraction of people opposed to abortion is growing. Indeed, only 40% of people believe most abortions to be moral. Only in the exceptional cases (rape, mother's health, diseased fetus, etc do majorities support abortion (around 80%). Most studies conflate these two and find that majorities support abortion rights, even though most people are against 99% of abortions.
As for women's rights, there is no disagreement so what is there to discuss? I am quite sure that I am likely to grant women more rights than you. However, if the fetus is a person, its rights win. No one, whether male for female, has the right to kill an innocent person. If the fetus is not a person, then it is clearly a woman and her rights vs a hunk of meat, and she wins. In short, people disagree about the fetus. They do not disagree about women. I generally feel that if people start talking about the woman's rights, it is because they tire of being forced to argue that a living human being is property that has fewer rights than a farm animal. Therefore, they switch to arguing a point where they are correct, but virtually no one disagrees.
In general, I think treating animals well is similar to good samaratanism - something we should expect of other people, shun them if they fail to do, but not enforce by law. I definitely do not consider animals on the same level as humans, though I do support voluntary efforts to improve the conditions of farm animals, especially hogs and chickens. Cows generally have it a bit better.
Unfortunately, there seems to be two extremes in this matter. First, there is the "do it cheap crowd" with only minimal standards enforced by law. Second is the whacky enviro left, which while pushing for decent standards for animal treatment, lumps it with all sorts of anti-science such as pathological fears of chemicals or anything "unnatural". This drives up the price too much. People like me, who would be willing to pay a bit more for meat raised humanely, are stuck either conceding the cruel practices or pay double to endulge someone else's irrationality. I have a couple of friends who are PETA types and I have tried to convince them that there are lots of people like me who could be swayed by voluntary standards, but these friends tend to be all or nothing types.
As for hunting, I simply consider it part of proper game management. It is a complete falsehood to believe that nature is in some sort of "balance" or is optimal without human interference. This is especially false given that we have dramatically reduced predator populations, causing animals such as deer and rabbits to wreak havoc. Excepting a few idiots, most hunters I know are very knowledgable about the game they hunt and care deeply about the population's health and habitat.
Why are women any more likely to be able to decide the ethics of human life than men? Actually, you could make the reverse argument - they have more self-interest in the matter than men, and therefore their opinion is more likely to be biased in their own favor.
I have slaughtered a number of animals over the years. I do not consider it cruel at all. Why? Because I compare it to reality. If I were a deer, I would want to die by a hunter's gun. The alternatives generally consist of some combination of starving, disease, and getting eaten alive. I'd prefer the bullet.
I guess I am not sure what you mean by cruel. Do you mean "causing physical pain and/or mental anguish"? In that case, I do not think cruel is synonomous with either unjust or immoral. If I poisoned you in your sleep to night, would that be cruel? You would never know what you were missing and would not feel a thing. Wouldn't this be an example of immoral but not cruel?
I love how your blog claims "socially adjusted" when you enter a discussion with the word "fucking". You are an interesting exercise in irony.
"Whose life?"
All lives should be treated equally. No society currently does this nor does any mainstream party advocate its consequences.
"It has been pointed out before that the sheer drop in crime rates beginning in the 1990's is attributable in large part to the drop in the segment of the population most likely to commit violent crime. I.e., a considerable majority of the abortions permitted by Roe v. Wade prevented the births of future killers."
True, abortion has likely lowered the crime rates. The problem is that you have saved 100,000 murders by committing 30,000,000 abortions. That argument clearly does not satisfy the "all lives are equal" premise.
How about quality of life? Should we err more on the side of protecting life even if the quality of it will be drastically lower for the mother, and thus necessarily for the would-be child, who will grow up to be an adult with considerably less to be happy about than a parent who is actually *prepared* to properly administer the life of another human being?
While the mother's loss could be drastic, I find it highly implausible (indeed, nearly logically impossible) that her loss could be greater than the fetus's.
Do we err on the side of protecting "life", no matter how ill-formed, or do we prevent misery of actual lives by cutting short those that are merely potential?
I consider it permissible to abort fetuses with severe birth defects, who will never be intelligent.
Which right is more unalienable? The right to life, or the right to the pursuit of happiness?
Obviously the former. You can't have liberty or happiness if you are dead.
I don't know the answer, but I note that the Declaration spoke of the rights of *men*. Not *potential*men*.
"Men" at the time, meant to most people "white males". I am glad we have expanded the definition. We should continue to do so.
FYI, I am not a Christian, nor have I made any argument here based on a religious premise, at least in the ordinary sense of the word.
While we will cure many of these diseases, doing so by using a method which requires sacrificing other humans is both immoral and unnecessary. There are lots of alternatives to and variations of stem-cell research that are unquestionably moral. There is no need to take the low road when we can take the high road to the same place, in about the same time. For example, it was recently demonstrated that we can pluck single cells from embryos (thereby not killing them) and use those to establish stem cell lines. There are still some technical and moral issues here but they are not insurmountable. The basic trick is that we have to wait long enough that the removed cell could not (under normal circumstances) develop on its own into a child, but not so late as to have too much differentiation and no possibility of establish stem-cell growth.
Approximately the same standard we use in law. Clearly, it is unjust to punish an innocent person. Clearly, it is unjust to not punish the guilty. Unfortunately, there is a trade off, and we set the error rate somewhere in this area.
With abortion, the numbers are not really much of an issue, for two reasons: first, before conception, the numbers are way to one side. After conception, they are way to the other. There is no mucking around in the grey area. Second, conception brings about a fundamental change in the entity, physically and morally. After this point, it is all grey and slippery slope. Any lines are arbitrarily drawn in the sand.
"actually, you're nice hypothetical question given by social economists is interesting because it depends on how much risk you are willing to take."
Yes, there is a certain level of reward that I would also make this gamble on - but it is quite large. How much would I have to pay you, right now, to take a 1/4 chance of dying? Logically, it would be at least a reward that provided a 33% increase in your future happiness. This is a pretty large reward. I do not think abortion makes the surviving humans 1/3 happier. I am not even sure it makes us much happier at all.
"a big hole in your argument is that unconscious, sleeping, or even people in many types of comas are thinking individuals. There are been people who remember things said to them in the room while in a coma. Dreams are instances of enhanced brain activity(and I've gotten an idea from one or two). unconscious people are in that same realm"
I agree that sleeping and unconcious people are having all sorts of brain activity, and that people in comas occasionally remember something. However, people in such situations are not intelligent in a manner that indicates rights. Can an unconcious person, for example, be "responsible"? Even if an unconcious person were to be held "responsible" for an action they committed while unconcious, we would normally assign the blame to what they did or did not do in preparation for this event.
There are few scenarios which I believe killing another human being (or other intelligent being) is justified. They all involve the same logic - that the killing will save more lives than it will take. War can be one of these situations. Self-defense is another. Unfortunately, there are still things worth fighting for.
And who I choose to help or how? In any case, I am not a hypocrite. There is no standard to which I hold anyone else that I do not hold myself to. Indeed, I hold myself to much more stringent standards. I would help the dying man in the desert and would expect you to do likewise. However, I never said that I expected you nor anyone else to make all possible positive sum trades, now did I?
"1) Your time spent on this calculation could have been spent in gainful employment."
Actually, I am at work. It's a slow day and I have lots of time. I can only read so many research articles in a day. But you do have a greater point. If I could find a way to donate this time to something more valuable, I would. However, I find value, both personal and for humanity, in making such posts and having these important discussions. For your information, most of my charity dollars go to exactly what you described.
"2) We live in a world that has exploded into a population of over 6 billion."
Birth rates are falling like a rock. Population will level off soon and then begin to fall. Most industrialized nations are facing a severe economic disaster if they don't get their birthrates up. The US is the best off of the bunch, fortunately, which is why you don't hear about it so much.
"Already we have more people than could be sustained at the current American's standard of living."
Technology will improve, drastically, long before that happens.
"We are already gearing up for big fights over remaining resources of energy (oil)"
We won't be burning oil in fifty years.
with other resources (potable water) to come. Unchecked, unrestrained growth will lead either to famine or war, and probably both.
Water is not an issue. Energy is. If you have energy, you have fresh water. People have been predicting the environmental apocalypse for decades. They have been wrong every time.
"b) a myopic focus on saving lives of local kids is inefficient, non-pragmatic, nationalist and borderline racist -- why so much time spent on saving an American embryo when that energy could save 100's of kids in Sudan?"
Let's follow that logic. All American social programs should be undone and the money spent in the third world. I am for it. Are you? Given that the government is going to take my money, it at least should spend it where it is needed most.
I am interested in why you think it is expensive to save local children. The ones I am currently talking about cost nothing to "save" - we are actually spending time and money to kill them.
are falling rapidly and generally well below replacement rates. Europe and many east-Asian countries are already under severe demographic stress due to the lack of children. Japan is already in population decline! It will not be long before this becomes a big issue in the states as well.
The choice of who has what rights when cannot be left to the choice of another (in this case, obviously biased) individual. On the contrary, this is one of the most important debates we must make as a society.
It would be a scary world where the whim of one person had the power to veto or discard the rights of another.
I have encountered a lot of different approaches to this question. "Potential matters" is the only one that I find consistent - by which I mean it does not lead me to conclusions that I am highly convinced are false.
As for "past matters", I agree that having a "past" is an additional consideration in favor of rights, but I find it neither necessary nor sufficient. The latter is more obvious. Terry Shaivo had a past, but no future. Most people agreed that she no longer had full rights. As for the former, I would offer the following hypothetical: If chickens were extremely intelligent (a big if, I know), could we still eat eggs? I would say no, and would fully support the armed chicken insurrection.
As for your AI question, I would say it occurs when the code is executed. Why? Because I believe there is another criteria for rights which I have not yet discussed - uniqueness. When talking about meat machines, this generally is not an issue as even identical twins are unique due to differences in other elements of their biochemistry. However, uniqueness is important for issues such as AI or borg/hive style hypothetical entities. Upon execution of an AI, it will begin to change, and therefore become unique and become worthy of rights.
Yes, we do have some sort of sliding scale for animal rights, which is based most irrationally on how cute and fuzzy they are. I am not particularly proud of these ethics. I do not believe animals have any rights, and we should use them as we see fit. In general, our interests align so this is not as bad as it sounds. Of course, we should not harm or torture them for no purpose. With respect to infants, yes, they are on the sliding scale, too. The question is when do they slide past the most important right of all - the right to their very life.