Someone is wrong on the internet!

[llennhoff]

Lured by a metaquotes post, I was browsing through the antitheism community. I found an example of bad reasoning (in support of a conclusion I agree with *sigh*). I went to post a reply when I discovered that the community only allows members to post. So I thought I would post it here instead:

I saw this question posed in one of the threads from your

Comments

[psychohist]

I'd suggest that it might be better to accept that the other person has a different moral code rather than trying to change it. In this case, especially, hers is based on religious faith, so you aren't going to change it with logic - and even if yours is based entirely on logic and not at all on emotion, explaining it in a few livejournal posts may not be realistic.

Then, you could approach it by trying to find a position that is acceptable to both of your moral codes. She might be willing to concede that people who can't have children other than by IVF should still have a chance to have a child; and with sufficient knowledge of the uncertainties of the IVF process, she might come to understand that left over embryos are sometimes inevitable. If she's not going to volunteer to host them, some are going to get thrown out anyway - why not get some good out of them? She might at least concede that others who don't share her moral code might be allowed to do that, even if she wouldn't want to participate herself.

The difficult part is the issue of how tax supported research can be seen as forcing her to participate, and I think she has a point there. However, the effect of the policy under the previous administration went much further than that - it largely prohibited even privately funded embryonic stem cell research by prohibiting Universities that received any federal money, even for other purposes, from doing such research. She might be willing to concede that's too much of a restriction - if you were willing to concede that direct federal spending on the research is questionable.

I would also note that, in fact, there have been some recent major successes in adult stem cell research, so she's not completely wrong there. Those successes make me think that while embryonic stem cell research is still important, it may not be as critical as I once thought.