Re: Frozen Embryo
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If a person is capable of being revived, then he is not dead.
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Your question concerning frozen adult humans doesn't tell us much about the case of frozen embryos, because we already know more about the possibility of revival in the case of embryos than in the case of adults.
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Ok, I'll try once more. Say this was 100 years ago and we didn't know how to 'revive' a frozen embryo. Would they still be alive? I can't see how 'alive' and 'non-alive' can be based on a possible future state of an entity and/or our ability to revive it. Say we try and revive an embryo and we fail, was it therefore dead while it was frozen? If not, when did it die? Or is it still alive because for all we know there is a future technique that could still revive it?
Nope, it seems treating 'alive' as a state of being rather than a potential state of being is the only meaningful way to deal with the subject ( that doesn't define how we deal with it). When they yelled, "It's alive!!" as Igor started moving, was Igor actually alive all the time since he just needed to be stimulated.
I don't see a problem with defining 'being alive' as a state, like ice and water. We don't think of ice as water merely because it's easy for it to be water. The moral question doesn't go away just because we correctly refer to entities in different states as being in different categories. The 'potential' stance leads to moral uncertainty and intellectual sommersaults. Alive/not-alive are not easy definitions to come up with, animal/vegetable/mineral do not have clear boundaries either. We do not call an cucumber an animal just because it's impossible to identify the boundary ( because there is no actual boundary and not even a good arbitrary one).
The state of medicine today leads to many cases of "we brought him back from the dead" situations. In those situations the person would have stayed dead 100 years ago. By your criteria, they were actually alive ( since the could have been revived), but if that's the case, when did those people 100 years ago die? Or in the modern cases where the revival fails what does the doctor put down as the 'time of death'? If a guy falls over in NYork and another in BoraBora is the NYorker alive but the BoraBoran dead even if they are in identical states?
A 10 year old does not get to argue for the rights of a 21 year old on the basis of "one day I'll be one". If I put a live chicken in the a boiling pot, PETA will be after me, if I put a fertized egg in it, they won't. I don't want to be fined for killing an oak tree when I barbeque an acorn.
"Me" is the "state of being me" and I don't see a moral problem with falling over and becoming 'dead' even if some medical miracle then revives me, I was still dead for some time. While I'm laying there I am just flesh, the 'me' part kicks in when the brain starts doing it's 'mind' thing again, if it never does, then I stay dead. My death doesn't depend on unrevivability by present day medical skill. Simply, if my mind stops, I stop. "I think, therefore I am" holds.
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