Playing god?

The anti-vaccination minority seems to be getting louder and more powerful with every passing day.  These are some strange times when it is people in rich countries who are opposed to vaccines, when it used to be the case even a decade ago that people in poor countries were the ones who needed to be convinced about vaccination!

Vaccinations have helped us defeat diseases, and even wipe out the nasty pathogens.  The small pox virus now lives only in highly secure test-tubes.  It is difficult to imagine that it was once one of the most feared monster diseases ever.  Even now my father has tales about the small pox wave that killed and maimed and disfigured children.

Defeating one disease after another, and coming up with ways in which we have effectively postponed death--which is what the remarkably high life expectancy means--is a tad like we are playing god, and very unnatural:

We play god when we vaccinate. We play god when we give women pain relief during labor. ... Our whole life is entirely unnatural. The correction of infertility is interfering in nature. Contraception is interfering in the most fundamental aspect of nature.

Where does "natural" end and the artificial begin?  We wrinkle as we age, for which there is now Botox and cosmetic surgery.  We grow bald: Hair transplant surgery has made Joe Biden look young again. Or, in tRump's case, he has become an orange monster!

An Oxford philosopher, Julian Savulescu, argues that we should go full speed into playing god:

The fact that we’ve done it or nature has done it is irrelevant to individuals and is largely irrelevant to society. What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.

Is it morally irrelevant?

Consider blood transfusions.  Unnatural. We humans do it routinely these days.  Left to nature, we would die from blood loss. But, we play god by taking blood from people and infusing it into others who need that vital juice.  So unnatural and playing god this is that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that blood transfusions are disrespectful of life itself.

Is morality irrelevant when we play god?

"People will vote with their feet once those technologies offer significant benefits," says Savulescu.

People will choose the unnatural alternatives. We have plenty of problems coming our way, like this:

The interesting question is how long we should live. At the moment we’ve pretty much maxed out what we can do with treating cardiovascular disease or cancer. But if we could attack aging, which is the real disease that causes adult onset cancer and cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes, people could live healthily for 200 years or longer. Then we’ll face the deep question, how long should we live? How many people should there be? How we will pay for people living to 150? How will younger people carve out a place in society? Will life become boring? These are really deep and difficult questions. Is this something that people should be able to choose, or should we place termination criteria on how long people can live? It may be that our death starts to become not just our choice, but society’s choice. Is it better to have a society with 500 million people living to 80, or 250 million people living to 160? Those are difficult questions that we may well have to decide. This idea that we’ll just leave it to the market to resolve is not going to wash.

So, what is his greatest worry?

I think we are the biggest threat to ourselves. The elephant in the room is the human being. For the first time in human history we really are the masters of our destiny. We’ve got enormous potential to have unprecedentedly good lives.

Or unprecedentedly godawful lives.  The choice is ours. The moment is now.