JH:

The questions of ethics and morality -- well, ethics, anyway -- are not "pesky". You have your own views about them.

The problem is that there are OTHER views also based on a sense of ethics, trying to wrestle with the question "what is the "good" course of action in such a situation".

Rapaire was making a valid point that you cannot blanket widely various situations with one overwhelming prescriptive moral tenet and expect to acheive the optimum "goodness" of result.

Some folks simplify their thinking by accepting some moral tenet or dogma as the definition of goodness in all cases. This makes thinking easier, because you only have to think as far as that one stable answer. Some folks even go so far as to bend the facts so as to preserve the integrity of their stable answer regardless of the ground-truth of the situation.

But that is not an ethical use of the mind, in my opinion; I think it is the mission of thought to seek the most rational answer possible in each situation, menaing that answer which will bring about the greatest well-being for the greatest number of efforts.

Another important point is that not everyone happens to believe that an individual human being is identical with a given number of cells. While I don't expect you to give it much credence, I have known many individuals who lost their start-up bodies before birth and shrugged it off and went on about their business, and got another. IF you believre, conversely, that life is only the mechanism, and that the mechanism itself (rather than an independent component) contains the "sanctity" (an unknwon quality, to be sure) of life, then you are in a different logical loop altogether.

I raise all these points to answer your question about what one might conclude that Rapaire was saying.

A