Araraukar wrote:Wallenburg wrote:Ara, dead people aren't sapient.
And if the proposal was talking about dead people, I'd agree. It's clearly not. It's talking about cloning living things, not dissecting dead things. A body without a brain can live (though likely not without intensive support machinery, and not for long). The "who" is not there, but the "what" is. The "what" can be allowed to die, it's called euthanasia when it's hastened with medications, otherwise you'd just unhook it from the support machinery and it'd die quick (in RL humans' case at least, when they stop breathing the body extinguishes itself quickly). To keep the "what" alive for conducting experiments on it and "use" (which is of such lovely vagueness that it sounds creepy) it, you would need the permission of the next of kin or, lacking such, the legally appointed guardian (which Legal Competence requires).
EDIT: If that - the requirement of getting said permission, which I can't imagine anyone involved in that situation would deny from the research team - was included, then I wouldn't have a beef with it. But the omission of even the "as allowed by previous legislation" thingy (which they do have for the cloning technology sharing) makes it clash.
A brainless body sustained on life support is not a person, sapient or otherwise, no more than a cancer growth is or a fetus is. No self-interested member state will interpret "members of a sapient species" to include objects that cannot be "members" of anything, in the commonly accepted definition of the word.