X-Message-Number: 16968
Subject: Re: Why beings of the future WILL reanimate us.
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 17:20:46 -0700 (PDT)
From:  (Peter C. McCluskey)

  (Lee Corbin) writes:
>Message #16959
>Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 08:42:45 -0700
>Peter McCluskey writes
>>I contend that ethical systems can make a wide variety of assumptions
>>about whose interests matter without being inconsistent, and that the
>>historical expansion in the class of beings whose interests matter to us
>>has been mainly caused by the benefits of cooperating with beings with
>>whom it has recently become practical to cooperate.
>
>I'm sure that this is true.  But our historically recent concern for
>horses, dogs, and cats has not arisen from any benefits that we get
>by cooperating with them.

 Yet you mention the animals with which we cooperate the most. Pigs
are about as smart, but because of our interest in eating them, we
have much less concern for their interests.

>  Instead, it's been in line with the sudden
>concern the West got for slaves about two hundred years ago.

 A concern which appears to correlate somewhat with the automation of
manual labor, which presumably caused an increase in the complexity of
the optimal level of cooperation between slaves and the rest of society.
(There were also reasons unrelated to basic ethical advances, such as
changes caused by improved transportation systems that made slaveowners
demand dangerous legal changes to help them capture runaway slaves.)

>> I don't want to suggest that the prior rules on abortion were optimal,
>
>>but it seems to me that cryonicists who want society to give the benefit
>>of the doubt to beings whose rights are disputed should at least demand
>>that doctors who perform abortions make every possible effort to insure
>>that the fetus lives.
>
>Well, I would say that a fetus a quarter of an inch long *per se* has
>no interests, intelligence, or sentience.  Such a creature, in and of

 Surely you will admit that genes have interests, and a fetus has genes?

 Anyway, I was mainly talking about late-term abortions where the fetus
is possibly viable with current technology, and for whom there is about
as much evidence of intelligence/sentience as there is for a frozen
person.

>Oh, sorry.  Yes, as machines, the genes certainly do act in ways
>that we would call "self-interested" only.  But the focus of many
>discussions is on whether *people* act altruistically or not.

 When deciding whether to respect the interests of beings not closely
related to oneself, the difference between a gene's interests and a
person's interests seems unimportant. I'm still unclear about whether
you are advocating ethical systems which require genes to behave
altruistically.
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter McCluskey          | Fed up with democracy's problems? Examine Futarchy:
http://www.rahul.net/pcm | http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf or .ps

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16968