[extropy-chat] Spanish Socialists consider givingapeshuman-level rights

[Brian Lee]

Isn't this a bit fascist to force a species to upgrade and achieve a higher 
intelligence.

I don't think you need to "uplift" any species until they are capable of 
asking for it.

You wouldn't support the idea of rounding up all the 85-IQers and forceably 
making them geniuses, why apes?

This strikes me of the hubris of the 19th (and earlier) century Europeans 
who thought they were doing the world such a favor by "civilizing" more 
primitive cultures. How did that work out?

BAL

>From: "Hughes, James J." <james.hughes at trincoll.edu>
>Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Spanish Socialists consider 
>givingapeshuman-level rights
>
> > 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
>
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