From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed May 01 2002 - 18:15:48 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Emlyn said:
>
> > As much as I hate to do it, I must agree with the anti-
> > reproductive-cloning camp. Cloning is still broken...
> > don't try this at home kiddies!
>
> I wish to discuss a long discarded concept called "freedom"
> that was widely understood in the 18th century. The word is
> frequently still used today, but the meaning has all but
> vanished from the consciousness of 20th and 21st century
> peoples, and certainly from the posts on this list.
>
> The basic idea is that if someone causes no other existing
> citizen harm, nor in any way harms that person's property,
> then we do not focus upon and attempt to legislate away
> that person's freedom to engage in that activity. As the
> U.S. Constitution said, "The powers not delegated to the United
> States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states,
> are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people"---in
> effect allowing freedom as the default condition.
I agree. Now, what I next wish to ask is the somewhat revolutionary
question of whether a sentient being can count as a "citizen" even if they
*lack* the capability to harm us. For example, very few four-year-old
children have any military or political power; the most we need to worry
about from them is that they will grow up to hate us (actually a real
possibility, I suppose).
Now, if cloning results in permanent damage to the cloned child, including
immune system vulnerabilities and accelerated aging, do we count it as
"performed in the privacy of one's own home, neither breaking my leg or
picking my pocket", or do we count it as "damage to a fellow citizen whose
rights must be protected"? I would count it in the latter category.
Children are people too.
Of course, I believe Lee Corbin has already explicitly declared that he does
not consider simulated beings - including future Copies of himself, if
applicable - to have any claim upon the simulators. If we are living in a
pocket universe, according to Lee, we have no moral right to chide our
simulators for anything inflicted on us; we are their property. Nor would
other External Beings have a moral right to regulate against nonconsensual
restrictive simulations, as long as those simulations are run on privately
owned computers. So I suppose the same one-way relation - total rights on
one side, no rights on the other - might consistently be held by Corbin to
apply to a parent and a child. Personally, I believe Corbin's position is
wrong, that ontological location is irrelevant to morality, and that parents
do not own children either.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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