Stem cell research / Assisted Suicide / Abortion / Legalized drugs ... the list goes on and on.
These issues are often approached and debated along moral and religious lines.
Religious: there is a God/ are gods and we should check to make sure what we do is coherent with certain teachings. Another variant is that our conscience is in fact God messaging to us.
Moral, "stronger" version: there are good and evil forces permeating the universe. In many cases, these entities are at war with one another. Note that this does not necessarily include the religious case above. For example, many people believe in Karma, etc.
Moral, "weaker" version: there is good and there is bad (and the ugly). We should strive to do what our conscience tells us primarily because we feel it is an integral part of us and is there for a reason. Put bluntly, if humans aren't humane, who will be?
Being an atheist since childhood, it is only in the rarest cases (so rare that I can't think of a single example) that I would allow my opinion to be swayed on issues based on religious or "strong" moral arguments. The closest I ever come to using a strong version is that when something good happens, I often think it happens because of who I am (as opposed to luck) and, in my opinion, this is a form of fate. However, if I'm pressed on the issue I would also be the first to admit that the term "fate" is extremely abstract (perhaps so abstract that it doesn't exist at all) and, yes, I am very lucky in many ways... if for no other reason than that I was born in a country with a roof over my head and parents who loved me.
So why, I ask, are people not debating this issue?
Many people will recall the purely philosophical question (up to now) "What if you are just a brain in a vat? For example, what if the year is really 2200 and you are just a small lump of skin hooked up to thousands of electrodes in some scientist's laboratory?" Certainly movies such as Total Recall have played with this Gedankenexperiment.
But as time moves on, "brains in vats" are getting closer and closer to reality. Over the past year, I've seen several reports on this and each time it's been along the lines of "Wow! Look what we can do with our awesome technology!". There has been no "but wait, what we do might cause someTHING a whole hell of a lot of pain?"
Believe me, people won't stop experimenting with this stuff until they have something they can poke at and make it go "ouch!". Indeed, for some, this may be where the fun begins.
My concern here is not necessarily at what point something is alive or dead (though that is certainly very important to define). It is that whatever we are creating, it just might at some point be able to feel real, and yes, excruciating pain.
My dad recently broke his arm (it was nearly split into two pieces). He passed out on the way to the hospital (and though fully insured, was forced to wait 5 hours in the hospital waiting room because he didn't arrive by ambulance). Later, he joked that it's a good thing there's only so much you can take before you finally pass out.
But computers and things we may create don't necessarily pass out.
How about this scenario: think of a stellite "of pain". We launch a spiffy brain satellite into space- perhaps in hopes it will tell us about the universe. It's loaded with enough energy to last it hundreds of years- next stop, Alpha Centauri. But wait there is an error in the program code. The poor "thing" trapped in metal casing spends the rest of its existence saying (for those familiar with the BASIC progamming language)
10 print "Get Me Out of Here!"
20 goto 10
If that ever happens, I hope the universe collapses onto itself and never repeats again.