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.
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.
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.
Would this difference disappear if we developed the technology to turn millions of sperm cells into babies?
Doesn’t our current cloning technology allow us to turn any ordinary cell into a baby, albeit one with aging-related diseases?
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.