Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 16:26:10 2006/07/10
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by Sarah
I think in a way you can't help but start a debate. If I say I prefer vanilla to chocolate, I do not want to start a debate and I recognize and respect the right of everyone else to disagree with me. But if I say that spousal beating is wrong, I express not a personal but a public moral value, rather than a merely aesthetic taste, and I necessarily implicitly demand that other people agree with me. Just as I cannot say, if I hear my neighbor beating his wife, "Oh well, each to his own; I may not agree with what he's doing but I respect his choice," so too I cannot hear that someone chooses to expose his future children to a risk 50 times greater than normal of suffering a horrible disease like type 1 diabetes and say, well, that's his choice. If I care about humanity and morality at all, I have to say that I insist he not mistreat future generations by exposing them to this risk. The world is already over-filled with people whose families have no serious genetic illnesses, so why carve out space for new people who may suffer horribly?
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