From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Mar 28 2003 - 15:13:51 GMT
Hi Johnny,
> 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."
You are asserting a "right" without explaining why you think it's a right.
Is this a God-given right? Does an unborn person have a right not to be
aborted?
> 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.
Who says "people need to be created equal?" Where did you get that
idea? On what basis do you make such an assertion?
> 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.
I don't see what being "fully human" has to do with it.
> 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.
I doubt it. Countries like the Netherlands which allow drugs, assisted
suicides, sex changes and such are less likely to invoke rigid controls
on genetic experiments than the U.S.
> 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.
If we can help evolution toward a better form of humanity, why would
that 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.
Human freedom isn't biological. It's intellectual.
> 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.
Not necessarily.
> 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.
Seems you should to explain what you mean by "humanity." After all,
technology is a human product. Nor do I see how a baby would be any
less human if cloned. And, what do you have against capitalism? Are
you a Marxist?
> 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.
Better to say your "feelings" rather than your MoQ until such time as
you lay out a complete metaphysics. So far your philosophy seems to
boil down to "maintain the status quo."
Platt
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