Cloning and Politics

[Russell Turpin]

Lucas Gonze writes:
>There is no doubt in my mind that embryos, zygotes, fetuses and even 
>egg/sperm pairs that are fated to meet have some amount of humanness. ..

Why stop there? In the purely biological sense, haploid
organisms are fully alive members of the species homo sap.

>I would not attempt to draw a line as to when something is human.  I would 
>only say that the idea that such things are human doesn't preempt the 
>discussion.  All humans are not
>accorded identical rights in either law or practice, and all deaths are not 
>considered equal.

Fine. But the law needs to state clearly the distinctions it
makes. And if those distinctions sometimes turn on "it is *this*
rather than *that*," then there needs to be a vocabulary for
*this* rather than *that*. And a reasonable decision procedure
to determine which it is. Jeff wants there to be two categories,
thinking that he will thereby limit the heft of law texts, and
he is using "human" for the more privileged of the two categories.

Russell


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