From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Sep 22 2002 - 18:38:30 MDT
Wesley J. Smith's "Transhumanists: The next great threat to human dignity"
begins by calling transhumanism an "explicitly eugenic" philosophy, thus
immediately proving his ignorance of the subject. The World Transhumanist
Association has adopted an explicit statement *against* eugenics.
Transhumanists advocate the right of individuals to define themselves
physically and psychologically using new technologies. Transhumanists are
opposed to groups attempting to forcibly impose a single physical and
psychological definition upon the rest of the world, including groups
seeking to outlaw consensual self-transformation, and groups espousing
exclusionary, racist, and hate-based views such as eugenics. (Or perhaps
Wesley J. Smith is attempting to advance an agenda of redefining all
genetic technology, including adult gene therapy, as "eugenics"; if so he
is flying in the face of common usage.)
An essential ethical principle arising from the Enlightenment humanist
movement is the idea that personhood and legal rights must be respected
regardless of differences, including differences of race and gender.
Transhumanism extends this principle to embrace the spectrum of
possibilities permitted by future technology, in the hopes of preventing a
repetition of the twentieth century in the twenty-first. It is disturbing
to find people attempting to whip up revulsion and hate against minorities
that do not, as yet, even *exist*. It is also disturbing to find that
Wesley J. Smith - having discovered that some transhumanists are also
animal rights activists - distorts the principle that all sentient minds
deserve equal rights into a statement that humans are "nothing more than"
animals. This distortion cuts against the grain of simple common sense; I
am not an animal-rights activist but it is still obvious to me that animal
rights activists advocate that certain animals are people, not that people
are animals. Similarly, the reason I am *not* an animal rights activist
is that I do *not* believe that animals are intelligent enough to deserve
what we now call "human rights", and will someday redefine as "sentient
rights". In any case, some transhumanists are animal rights activists,
some are not; if Wesley J. Smith thinks that all transhumanists are animal
rights activists - though what is sinister about this is not clear - then
he is simply mistaken.
Any reader interested in getting an undistorted picture of transhumanism
is cordially invited to browse the World Transhumanist Association website
at www.transhumanism.org.
Sincerely,
Eliezer Yudkowsky,
Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:14 MST