The ethical conclusion would be to err on the side of caution – since we have no way of knowing when a baby becomes conscious.

“That’s not even wrong.” – Wolfgang Pauli.

In some ways, ‘we have no way of knowing when a baby becomes conscious’. On the other hand, we can specify some times when we have a way of knowing a baby is not conscious (yet). E.g. – no brain, no consciousness.

Besides, you’re using Occam’s Razor anyway. How do you know sperm don’t carry the soul, for example?

…from the use of electric shock collars on disabled kids in New York schools…

Kind of a muddled reference to this, I guess? “But many parents insist that no other kind of treatment successfully curbs their severely autistic children from injuring themselves through actions such as intentionally hitting their heads or gouging their eyes.” (Or this:“This school has saved my daughter’s life,” said Marcia Shear of Long Island, whose 13-year-old daughter, Samantha, used to punch herself in the head so often that she detached both retinas.

…our current quest to “cure” autism by finding a marker by which we can abort autistic people before they’re born…

Wait, what? Finding out the genetic causes of autism helps understand the disorder better, leading to more effective intervention and treatment!

Every debate that relies on the construction “it should be assumed safe because it has not yet been proven unsafe” is an example of Occam’s razor doing harm (by exposing us to great risk).

Perhaps. It’s not an inevitable corollary of Ockham’s Razor, though. What of the argument that “this hasn’t been identified to cause problems before, therefore it must be safe”?

I suppose if you could identify an actual example of that being used in reality, it’d help. Your current example doesn’t work:

we are using the children of such “families” as experimental subjects

Other principles (such as personal liberty and parental autonomy) come into play in that situation. More, there is evidence regarding such families, and it shows… some differences, not a particularly strong effect.

You kind of have a point with “the genetically engineered crop debate, where legitimate concerns are brushed aside” – but you misidentify the culprit. If there are “legitimate concerns” then by definition Ockham’s Razor isn’t being applied appropriately. It only applies when picking between hypotheses that explain the existing evidence equally well.

You also can’t get away from Ockham’s Razor, anyway. Why else do you assume these words were written by a human being and not a branch being blown by the wind, or an angry ghost?

You wrote:

We don’t need to “go there” with the soul thing at all. The point is, it’s human, and defining “which” humans have rights has never ever ever ever resulted in anything good.

Nor we should “go there” with the “person” thing. Instead of insisting the Supreme Court declare that the child in the womb is a “legal person,” or that a human being is a “legal person” from conception, we need to insist that the Supreme Court acknowledge, not declare, that every human being is entitled to the protection of law. The difference is that if we play along with the Supreme Court’s false pretensions as though it actually has the authority to declare that some members of the human family are legal “persons,” then we have implicitly (and dishonestly) agreed that they have the authority to declare that other members of the human family are not legal persons.

The truth of the matter is that they simply do not have the authority to bestow the protection of law on any segment of humanity or to withdraw it. And they certainly can’t measure one’s “personhood” any better than they can tell if one has a “soul.”

Humanity preceded the state and brought it into existence. It is time for humanity to knock Caesar off his high horse and put him in his place, reminding him that it is not his to bestow or withdraw the inalienable rights of humanity; it is his only to protect them. That is, of course, because those rights are just that — inalienable — they didn’t come from the state, and the very reason humanity brought the state into being is to protect those rights.

We need a “Humanity Amendment” not Personhood amendments.

Flesh that out. Two or three examples, with explanation of why Occam’s Razor was the determining factor.

The history of science and the history of Occam’s razor are one and the same, because Occam’s razor is one of the assumptions that has to be true in order for a scientific conclusion to be accurate.

As far as your question, every single time that we used Occam’s razor instead of ethical “err on the side of caution”, that is an example of science being responsible for human rights abuses.

Three examples?

1. In the abortion debate: the Occam’s Razor conclusion would be that a baby is not “conscious” until it reaches a certain point of “complexity”. The ethical conclusion would be to err on the side of caution – since we have no way of knowing when a baby becomes conscious.

2. disabled rights debate: every single human rights violation occurring today – from the use of electric shock collars on disabled kids in New York schools, to the inhumane ways we treat the cognitively disabled – even to our current quest to “cure” autism by finding a marker by which we can abort autistic people before they’re born – relies on the Occam’s Razor conclusion rather than the ethical conclusion.

3. using people/populations/the earth as live experiments: Every debate that relies on the construction “it should be assumed safe because it has not yet been proven unsafe” is an example of Occam’s razor doing harm (by exposing us to great risk).

This includes the gay marriage debate, where we are using the children of such “families” as experimental subjects – instead of the more ethical conclusion, where we would not assume that motherlessness or fatherlessness is harmless for a child until we actually have not only an absence of evidence, but actual evidence supporting the idea that somehow having a second father does something to offset the known harms and risks of motherhood.

This also includes the genetically engineered crop debate, where legitimate concerns are brushed aside. The ethical approach would be to keep GE crops apart from the rest of the ecosystem until we have evidence suggesting those concerns are ill-founded.

In all these and many more cases, the starting assumption is that a thing is permissable and safe even if there are legitimate concerns about human rights violations, environmental impact, or other major – even catastrophic – consequences – because the starting assumption, Occam’s razor-like, says that these concerns are not given any weight until they have evidence behind them – specifically, the only way to legitimize these concerns is to let the scientists have their way and if the predicted harm comes to pass, we know the concerns were legitimate (it’s rather like determining whether someone is a witch by throwing them in water, and if they float, they’re a witch).

We require Home Depot to perform impact analysis before it builds because it might accidentally kill an endangered species, but for some reason science gets a free pass on the impact analysis even when being wrong could be catastrophic. It’s almost as if we think the people (and nations) scientists want to experiment on are somehow not as important as a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

Clendinen should not be legally obligated to receive ALS treatment, nor should he be indirectly coerced into doing so by the way we structure public policy more broadly, nor should we create a culture in which Clendinen’s freedom to live in accordance with his conscience is, in general, disrespected.

The flip side of all that, though, is that others whose beliefs and preferences are different from his should not be legally obligated not to receive ALS treatment (as is already the case in places where a government health monopoly can deny you treatment and seeking treatment outside the monopoly is illegal), nor should they be indirectly coerced into not receiving it by the way we structure public policy more generally (as is already the case in a much lager number of places), nor should we create a culture in which the default social assumption is that it is Clendinen’s responsibility to rid us of his troublesome self (as is already the case in a few places where euthanasia has become acceptable).

The history of science is a history of human rights violations justified by the idea that science must (must!) lead to a miracle cure, so therefore any lives we harm now will be “worth it” because it will (presumably) help lots of lives later on.

No, no – it’s the history of Occam’s Razor. At least, that’s what you said the last time, and I asked you then:

Flesh that out. Two or three examples, with explanation of why Occam’s Razor was the determining factor.

Why import the legal issue?

You’d have to ask Greg Forster that question – he’s the one who specifically brought up “the way we deal with these issues in public policy”.

Now, should Clendinen be legally obligated to recognize a lien on his body by another, perhaps supernatural, entity?

Why import the legal issue? Stewardship (as opposed to ownership) is a way of thinking, a doctrine for life, not a legal controversy 99% of the time. It’s a reminder the universe — with your body included — is not all about you.

There is an authoritarian, Kantian tendency to expand opinions into universal rules and then criticize the opinion based on its impractical universality. When a person says, “You must confess to Jesus Christ for your salvation,” he is not also automatically saying “You should be legally obligated to confess to Jesus Christ.” As Bl. John Paul said, “The church proposes. She imposes nothing.”

But the authoritarian frame of mind recognizes no distinction between proposing and imposing and is therefore confused by the proclamation of natural law. Does the physician tell a patient he should eat less and exercise more, or does he petition his legislature that everyone everywhere eat less and exercise more? Does the scientist legally obligate someone to obey the law of gravity, or does he simply announce its existence and its effect?

Now we may debate politically about the justice of transfat bans or the wisdom of putting up safety railings around the grand canyon, but neither of those debates are the same as the dialectic about justice (with an eye toward health) and wisdom (with an eye toward gravity). Related, for sure, but not identical. Similarly, a debate about the morality of suicide is not a legislative deliberation about man-made law.

The Christian disposition rather dismisses the artificial diversions of human regulations as infinitesimal against natural law, as if parliamentary decrees could outlaw sunrises and ocean tides. With that in mind, my inclination is to give unto Caesar, and to put not my trust in princes. Make your laws for or against suicide, murder, abortion, and “victimless” prostitution and drug use. But work them out in fear and trembling and recognize what far-reaching, unseen culpabilities you are volunteering upon yourself. How do your laws imperil another’s soul and thereby your own? How does your advocacy encourage evil under the false cover of “legality”? Either you believe you are answerable to the “supernatural” or you don’t. If you don’t, then “all is permitted” no matter what the state has concluded.

The history of science is a history of human rights violations justified by the idea that science must (must!) lead to a miracle cure, so therefore any lives we harm now will be “worth it” because it will (presumably) help lots of lives later on.

But this is not sound reasoning. Nor does the history of science bear this out. It is based on several cognitive biases – for instance, it requires that you minimize or downplay the harm done by ethical violations, while crediting every advance to “science”, as if humans hadn’t started solving problems or inventing things until the scientific method came along.

The history of mankind shows that technological progress without ethics leads to nightmare, and usually to collapse – and the way out of nightmare and collapse is through ethical progress.

Given the history of what was done to disabled people in the name of a “scientifically improved” society, quadriplegics have special reason to be concerned that science be restrained by ethics. Ethics is the only thing that protects all of us. The absence of ethics always, invariably equals dystopia.