Karlos wrote:
"Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests"
Well, when you use only reason as your guide, you can justify an awful lot of things which may make scientific sense but are clearly unethical.
What it comes down to is that a lot of ethical things are a matter of opinion.
In your example, it's not the case that you have shown that one can reason something "clearly unethical". I would say that it's not clear which way is ethical. As you said, you can reason that we should sterilise. But equally, we can reason that it is unethical.
Reason is a tool that allows you to deduce what follows from an original set of statements or ideas, but you still need to have some way of deciding how we measure what is best, what is ethical. As long as the person making the argument is able to explain what his way of deciding whether things are ethical or not, along with his reasoning, then that is fine.
If you think that someone has used reason to suggest something that you feel is "clearly unethical", then there ought to clearly be an alternative set of reasoning to prove your point, and counter the original argument.
"There is nothing scientifically unreasonable about this approach."
There are plenty of of things unreasonable with your point. *I* can come up with plenty of reasons why what you describe should not be done, but I'm curious that you seem to hold a belief that you seem to simultaneously believe is ethical but unreasonable. I'm also not sure what you mean by "scientifically unreasonable" - I don't think science itself makes any ethical judgements (a nuclear bomb can be made using science; obviously scientific things are not always ethical), but science can be used when reasoning.
That's not to say that I think people should give in if someone is a better debater than you are - I realise that sometimes, people have a gut feeling that something should be unethical even if they can't explain why. But just because they are unable to explain it doesn't mean that there is no way to explain it.
