From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@MSX.UPMC.EDU)
Date: Tue Sep 18 2001 - 15:31:17 MDT
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
I, myself, have been disturbed at how often people try to link racism,
isolationism, initiation of force, sacrifice of innocents, benevolent
dictatorship, censorship, shutdown of unpopular ideas, and the like with the
Extropian Principals. A lot of people seem to support freedom, but only for
their own ideas, not for someone else's ideas.
### I fully agree with you and I share your distaste for these displays of
Un-Extropian thinking. The post suggesting genocide as a solution was
particularly shocking.
-----
Some recent postings seem to suggest that we should sacrifice innocents to
speed up the development of technology in the name of The Extropian
Principals. I do not think these ideas derive from the principals at all.
Other postings have suggested that the principals are fine for academic
discussion, but we are at war and the principals no longer apply. If this
is true, we need to adjust the principals. Principals are statements of
truth for all time. They cannot just be discarded when they become
inconvenient.
#### I reject utilitarianism, which seems to be guiding some of the posts,
suggesting the sacrifice of large numbers of innocent or only peripherally
involved persons, today, for the sake of more or less nebulous benefits to
humanity, in 10 years (or 50 or 100 ...)
Precisely because a war is threatening to explode, moral principles are even
more important to guide our behaviour when unrecoverable lives can much
easier lost than in peacetime.
There are very few and limited situations where I could accept the death of
innocent others to benefit me and revenge is not one of them.
There is a beautiful short story by Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Road to Omelas"
(if I remember the title correctly). It's worth reading.
Rafal Smigrodzki
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