From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sat May 25 2002 - 09:32:43 MDT
---> Samantha Atkins
> Reason wrote:
>
> > [Aside: you know, I really don't think anyone arguing back and
> forth in the
> > past few days on this and similar topics really disagree on
> ethics/morals.
> > It's all factual/societal-opinion-as-fact items that are being
> debated. Very
> > similar to the current abortion debate. e.g. what is human, what is the
> > value of a potential human, etc, etc.].
> >
>
> Some of us here apparently very much disagree on ethics and
> morals or at least what should be a matter of social ethics - of
> law. Some of us very much disagree on language equating infants
> to animals and of "low replacement cost" and claiming women are
> less valuable than men and more subject to some assumed huge
> negative memetic influence. I don't consider that decent
> coffee-table discussion and I certainly don't consider remotely
> material I feel like slogging through on a list that is supposed
> to be about (I thought) creating a bighly viable and wide-open
> future.
>
> Please do not pretend that some of the opinions expressed are
> civilized or that they are just ideas and arguing points with
> no practical ties to the real world. If the latter were true
> then the dicussion would be even more pointless and twisted.
[Civilized = something that Samantha agrees with or feels comfortable with],
apparently.
Actually, it would seem that the major difference between you and most of
the other posters is that you advocate or tend towards magical thinking
while they advocate or tend towards the scientific method. This may be an
ethical difference, or simply a difference in assumed metafacts, I'm not
sure.
With regards to your first paragraph there, equating infants to animals
using some set of criteria is a factual discussion, or a conclusion arrived
at by a society by consensus. Either you subscribe to this fact/opinion and
its justifications or you don't. No ethics involved at all until you get to
deciding what you're going to do based on those agreed facts. More or less
everyone here agrees that it's bad to just jump up and hurt a human, but
it's ok to destroy something that needs a lot of work to get to be human
(skin cell, stem cell, etc). After that, it's just a matter of definitions
and drawing lines down the middle.
Whether or not you find it pleasant to think about, many similar things
(value of people, value of infants, value of races) have been settled on in
a consensus manner in radically different ways in different times and
societies. Many "civilized" and complex societies have declared whole
segments of what is currently considered humanity to be objects of little
value.
This whole thing originally came about as a result of querying where to draw
the line between human and non-human, and assigning a value to potential
humans. This is an eminently valid discussion. If human societies can't deal
with this now (vis abortion debate, racial tensions, societal values placed
on various people of types), what makes you think a transhuman society --
with an infinitely greater set of potential humans and types of intelligent
entity -- is going to do better without some work? Burying your head in the
sand and refusing to talk about the values societies have placed, currently
place and could conceivably place on human and potentially human life is not
constructive. Follow that route and you end up with a) smartcats as
disregarded property, b) slave AIs that are destroyed when no longer needed,
c) humans created for specific tasks and broken down for organs when done.
If you see c) as being much more disturbing that a) or b) then I say you
have some hard thinking to do.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com
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