From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jun 27 2002 - 04:41:55 MDT
On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 05:11:39PM -0400, Brian Phillips wrote:
> I'll frankly admit I am not as ethically sophisticated as Eliezar,
> but I see two big options.
> Be selfish, or be altruist.
Which is far too binary. Rational self-intrest often leads to
behavior that looks entirely altruist, benefits everybody but has
selfish reasons.
If we can help Africa we get millions of new customers for our
products - and millions of new brains, hearts and hands for the world
economy. If they have democracies rather than kleptocracies they will
be able to produce more advanced stuff than raw materials, be more
efficient and have an incentive to improve. We lessen the risks of
terrorism, unchecked epidemics and environmental erosion. These are
utterly selfish reasons, but strong reasons to find ways of helping.
But ways of helping that work are far more tricky; they do not fit
into the simplistic rhetoric of "do nothing/force them to conform".
They would rather involve setting up the institutions,
self-organising principles and markets needed; part of this could be
toppling a few truly malign governments or actually avoiding
meddling, but other components might be lowering or removing tariffs
and agricultural subsidies, support for microloan institutions or de
Soto's legitimization program. These are complex, parallel solutions
- but many of them profit us quite directly too.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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