From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jun 20 2002 - 02:25:18 MDT
On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 08:05:18PM -0700, Max More wrote:
>
> So, someone has the guts to do this. Obesity is an out-of-control epidemic
> in the U.S.A.
The problem here may be that there are forces working hard on creating a
"war on obesity": it is a serious problem, but at the same time it ought
to fall under morphological freedom, shouldn't it? If we accept
cyborgization, new skin colors and extra brains, why not extra fat? The
SA policy makes sense and is not really problematic (you pay for the
seats you take up, and these are a discrete resource). But there are
other ideas floating around that are really worrying, like fat taxes
(!). The idea seems to be to "help" obese people by making fat food more
expensive (and in Sweden, such ideas a phrased in terms of giving the
health care system more money to deal with these "problem people").
http://www.reason.com/sullum/051002.shtml
Obesity tend to make people react strongly because it is at the
intersection of other hot issues such as the ideal body image, the right
to be oneself, ideas of sin and of aesthetic appeal. It is a convenient
jumping-off point for a lot of people to push their agendas, as seen in
the article above.
Obesity sometimes have genetic factors such as the thrifty gene, and
there are likely some genetically influenced personality traits that
affect food preferences and weight setpoints. At the same time it can be
handled - not trivially, but with some effort. The problem seem to be
that we live in a culture where people are not assumed to be able to
make such efforts, so any suggestion that they ought is really some kind
of oppression or body image discrimination. While on the other hand
attempts to "fix" the "problem" phrased in terms of health are
acceptable as long as they work on the entire population (i.e. central
influence over all citizen bodies).
>From a transhumanist position, I think we should wend our way carefully
here. In we end we both need morphological freedom and self direction.
The SA policy is reasonable since it is a local action that makes people
pay for their lifestyle choices - and opens the door for competing
airlines without this rule; let the market sort this thing out.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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