From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Wed Dec 04 2002 - 13:58:00 MST
naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) writes:
>As usual, I fail to understand the "ethical" aspects of this. The
>quoted article calls for "a moral and ethical debate" but leaves
>me entirely in the dark what to debate about. Is there some mystical
>property ascribed to the face in contrast to other organ assemblies?
No, there are differences between cosmetic surgery and surgery that would
make you feel better even if nobody else noticed the results, and there
are differences between surgery which makes you better than average (i.e.
increases inequality of social status) and surgery which makes the patient
more average/normal.
There is probably some instinctive desire to use appearance as a guide
to the quality of the genes that a potential spouse might contribute. To
the extent that this is why people value pretty faces, changing one's
face seems like fraud.
I hypothesize that the people who claim there are ethical problems with
cosmetic surgery are reluctant to come up with a clear argument because
they don't want to think clearly about the degree to which social status
matters to them.
Here's an extropian vision for a technology which would neutralize most
of those motives for objecting to cosmetic surgery:
You download some basic open-source designs for face-changing nanites,
and add your own artistic touches, taking care to include some features
that are obviously unnatural. You put pictures of your old and new face
on your website to minimize the chance that anyone will be misled by the
change.
It would be interesting to find out if people would still raise ethical
questions if this technology could be made as safe and cheap as earrings.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Free Jon Johansen! http://www.rahul.net/pcm |
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