[extropy-chat] What the #$?! are rights anyway?

[Robert Bradbury]

On 6/15/06, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Convince me and my client the devil that rights, human
> or otherwise, actually exist.


They *don't* "actually" exist!  They are pure inventions of beings that can
think "consciously" in order to develop a social structure which is less
prone to destruction and/or decay then would otherwise be the case.

The "rights" used to be handed down by those in power until such a time as
the people decided to assert them for themselves.  (The many can overpower
the few or the one if they agree that their rights are relatively equal).
All of the rest of the discussion of extending rights is probably due to the
fact that feeling sympathy for those less fortunate probably had survival
advantages (reciprocal social contracts which promote self-survival when one
is less able to care for oneself, e.g. due to injury or illness, is probably
the origin of "rights").

If Extropianism has any value it may revolve around whether or not we can
consciously agree on a single or multi-dimensional scale that can be used to
evaluate the value of forms of complexity or relative "worth" of such
complexity (value & worth can be context dependent).  This would replace the
social contract based system where you and I agree that we have a "right" to
life and use that agreement to bring down our lethal injections, bullets (or
the wrath of 500 lb bombs) on those who disagree with that right.

Mind you, not a lot of people on this list, much less in the world at large,
would be willing to agree that their self-proclaimed (& group-acknowledged)
rights are null and void and should be replaced by a system which perhaps
might balance whether their past, present, or potential future contributions
should determine their access rights to the matter & energy at our disposal.

If such a system were in place I suspect we might be putting a lot of
elderly individuals to sleep.  Because with the exception of those signed up
for cryonic suspension most of those say 60-65+ are a net drain (i.e. they
are contributing more towards problems like global warming that are going to
have to be cleaned up later than they might contribute to bringing forward
lifespan extension, a friendly AI, whatever, that might justify their
current resource consumption).

As a challenge, go through Fortune Mag's Top 10, 100, Hollywood or Sports
stars, etc (I'd argue against using politicians...) and do an up or down (or
"weakest link") analysis for who is potentially accelerating the development
of singularity related breakthroughs vs. who is retarding them.

Instead of the question "Do they have a right to live?" one might instead
ask "Is their continued existence justified?"  Mind you, since we have an
extremely large excess of resources at our disposal currently we can be very
generous but that will *not* always be the case.

Robert
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