[extropy-chat] Spanish Socialists consider giving apeshuman-level rights

[Hughes, James J.]

> I would recommend
> safely enhancing animals to be roughly on par with human intelligence

In Citizen Cyborg I argue that great ape "uplift" is a moral obligation,
on the same grounds that if we had the ability to prevent or cure
retardation in a child we would be obliged to do so. How we go about it
is complicated, since I wouldn't want to see all great apes in the wild
rounded up and subjected to medical experimentation to achieve it. But
rescuing apes from poachers and habitat destruction is already on the
table, and experiments with cogniive enhancement drugs, gene tweaks and
brain machines are one of the few ethical ways that apes could be
subjected to research without consent since they would benefit from it
as much as we would.

See this interesting report for more conservative ruminations on the
prospect:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5733/385

Science, Vol 309, Issue 5733, 385-386 , 15 July 2005

Moral Issues of Human-Non-Human Primate Neural Grafting

"...it might even be argued that such changes constitute a potential
benefit to the engrafted animal, insofar as the changes are viewed as
enhancements of the sort we value for ourselves..."

------------------------
James Hughes Ph.D.
Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 
http://ieet.org
Editor, Journal of Evolution and Technology
http://jetpress.org
Williams 229B, Trinity College
300 Summit St., Hartford CT 06106
(office) 860-297-2376 
director at ieet.org