From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 23:27:20 GMT
Hi Platt,
I'd respond to the "it's our bodies" defense with "no, it's a brand new
citizen's body, and that person has a right not to be engineered to order."
And then there's the point that all people need to be created equal, so we
can't let some people engineer supposed advantages into people while other
people continue to be born naturally. And the whole issue of power.
Gradually allowing ourselves to become a species that relies on artificial
reproduction means that we would no longer have the biological potential to
be fully human, we would require a commercial laboratory for our
reproduction, and that lab would have all the power over our reproduction.
And we CAN control it. Even if we can't prevent it completely, we can
certainly make laws against it and officially condemn it, and make it as
rare as, say, space-based nukes are.
But on top of that, there's a more important problem with the MoQ: it
implies that evolution deserves our respect and help, when evolution just
happens regardless of our respect and encouragement (well, respect surely
guides evolution toward whatever we respect, but we don't have to respect
evolution. it respects us). We don't have a moral obligation to help
evolution along toward some better form of humanity, that's something Nazis
try to do. And we certainly don't have an obligation to help higher levels
of patterns that might be in conflict with humanity. For example,
technology might be an intellectual pattern, but if it decides it doesn't
need us, or needs us in a limited engineered capacity, we don't have an
obligation to help it along just because we are social/biological patterns,
we can choose our biological human freedom over it. Pirsig's MoQ says we
ought to write human freedom off if a higher level pattern would survive
better with us as its slaves, created for its service, and that is what
Genetic Engineering would do. Technology, through its tools such as
corporate democracy and consumer marketing and capitalism, will dictate to
us what future people should be like, to the point that they won't be able
to even realize what freedom they had lost, they'd be engineered to be
content. Only if we all continue to be actually born to our parents will we
still have a connection to humanity.
My MoQ would say it is expected for humans to try to maintain their freedom
and way of life, so when a technology comes along that threatens it, it is
moral to thwart it.
This is another reason to read that CS Lewis book, btw. The other reason
was to see how changes to morality must be from morality, following moral
patterns of change, not separate and apart from morality.
Johnny
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