From: Jason Joel Thompson (jasonjthompson@home.com)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 16:50:22 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: <hal@finney.org>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
> But isn't it inconsistent to have a blanket statement that abortion is
> ethical while infanticide is not? A baby one day from being born can
> be killed, while a baby one day after being born cannot? There is not
> a clean line between these two cases. Birth is a process, not an event.
>
> This is the tension which drives the search for a better solution.
Many humans have difficulty proceeding in the face of this ambiguity. With
this issue we are presented with a moral continuum, over which the act of
termination appears to become increasingly "wrong." We seem to want to have
a single answer-- an absolute rule, rather than an algorithm. Yes, no,
black, white, is it a 'right' act or a 'wrong' act?
The ambiguities are not going to go away.
We simply need less static ethos by which to navigate them.
Unfortunately, law books are predicated on static ethos. This necessitates
the writing of more and more laws to cover specific contingencies.
Ideally we would have a 'utility machine.' Push a button on its side and it
extrapolates the consequences of a particular action out over a reasonable
time frame and spits out a little hedonistic ticker: %pleasure, %pain, or
some such.
In the absence of such predictive power, we might need to start thinking
about ways to reconcile ourselves to moral grayness.
I have a question-- to avoid the growth of increasingly fine grained
rule-sets, we might look toward algorithmic approaches to create legal
frameworks. I wonder if list members have ideas about what form those
algorithms might take?
--
::jason.joel.thompson::
::founder::
www.wildghost.com
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