From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Thu Apr 04 2002 - 18:05:37 MST
Rationality, in my opinion, is a means to an end. It is not an end in
itself. On the other hand, many of the extropian principles (like self
direction) are ends in themselves.
Perhaps it would be useful to make this distinction explicitly in the
principles? That is, the distinction between principles which encapsulate an
axiom of extropianism, a given, and those which present the best known means
of getting there.
Emlyn
Robert wrote:
But extropianism is also about being "rational" (see principle 7).
If I rationally think that one of the greatest goods is saving
the greatest number of human lives and that accelerating our
perpetual progress (principle 1) will be the best way to get
the intelligent technology (principle 4) necessary to do that
then it rationally makes sense for me to choose to live in
the country that taxes my income and uses that money most
effectively to protect me while encouraging the research necessary
to accomplish this. I would claim anyone choosing not to
do this would be behaving irrationally unless they cite
the principle of self-direction (#6) as trumping the above
cited principles. And even then I'd likely consider them
to be irrational -- they would be playing russian roulette
with their life because their hazard function is significantly
increased by choosing to live outside the society I've just
described.
So I think extreme libertarian positions are not extropic.
You need to come up with a way to convince me that libertarian
societies would be safer and better at accelerating the progress
than the current system we now have.
Want to play rock, paper, scissors? :-)
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