From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Mon Sep 23 2002 - 13:21:47 MDT
"Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
> Actually, here in Europe the European Comission on human rights have
> claimed people have a right to be born with an unmodified genome (based
> on some muddy reasoning) and I think UNESCO is also claiming something
> similar. At the same time prenatal surgery is totally OK, which shows
> that the debate is not really about the *outcome* but the means and the
> misty connotations they have.
That sort of thing is not limited to transhuman issues. It seems to me that
morality should be one thing that is not abstract, but self proclaimed
ethicists make their commandments on medicine by using all sorts of exotic
and non obvious moral principles (a human's genome should be determined by
chance not intelligence) and their decisions about war with true but
irrelevant facts (the people of Afghanistan should chose their own rulers).
There are only two legitimate questions to ask when judging if something
is right or wrong, if a moral principle can not help in answering these
then I have no use for it.
1) Is the proposed action intended to increase the net amount of world
happiness or decrease the net amount of world ignorance?
2)Will it work as advertised?
Granted these questions are not always easy to answer (especially the
second) but all the more reason not to mix in silly things that have no
bearing on the matter. It just can't be said too often, ethicists are the
lowest form of human life.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:14 MST