[extropy-chat] Article: The Trouble With Transhumanism

[Samantha Atkins]

On Jun 19, 2006, at 7:01 PM, Neil H. wrote:

> An article by Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute:
>
> http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=15222_0_32_0_C
>> From the end of the article:
>
> ""Personhood as the criterion for moral value would entitle smart
> robots, uplifted animals, and artificially intelligent
> computers—assuming they ever exist—to equal rights. But the cost would
> be high to existing and future human beings, particularly the unborn,
> infants, and the profoundly brain injured, who would all be excluded
> from the moral community under that ethical paradigm. This could lead
> to practices such as cloned fetal farming and killing the
> catastrophically brain injured for their organs.
>

The unborn are not included now except by rabid fundamentalist  
trash.   Infants have rights to care and against abuse but not  
precisely the same rights as adults.  Ditto with children and adults  
that have become variously incompetent.   The profoundly brain  
injured should be allowed to die if that is the wish of their loved  
ones or those with medical power of attorney.  Again the rabid  
fundamentalist fringe fights this.   The rest of this is silly  
drivel.  Embryo cloning is only a violation of rights again to these  
fundie lunatics who unfortunately now have considerable clout in the  
US government.

Sorry to be harsh but I have had it with the power of the religious  
right in this country.

> "Unfortunately, such eugenics thinking can be seductive. Indeed, the
> government is already flirting with transhumanist fantasies. Thus,
> "Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance," a 2002
> report issued by the National Science Foundation and United States
> Department of Commerce, recommended the government spend billions
> pursuing some of the very technologies that transhumanists crave to
> utilize in their morphological quests. And real money is already being
> spent on threshold transhumanist agendas: The NIH just issued a
> $773,000 grant to Case Law School in Cleveland to determine the
> "ethically-acceptable rules" to permit human research into genetic
> enhancement technologies."

Which technologies?  What is being included in these "billions" as  
being to the liking of the evil eugenic minded transhumanist horde?

>
> "... It is easy to laugh at transhumanist fantasies but there is
> nothing funny about a movement whose core value is inherently
> discriminatory and oppressive. And while we will almost surely never
> become a post human society, we could easily devolve into a
> post-sanctity-of-life culture. The antidote to such a dystopian future
> is to stick with the basics and by recommitting ourselves to the
> fundamental concepts of human exceptionalism and the intrinsic value
> of all human life."
>

It is easier to laugh at a pile of drivel which is the best this  
opponent seems able to come up with.  Sanctity of life my ass.   
Fundies don't consider life sacred.  They only consider their  
dogmatic views to be sacred.   If life was sacred they would support  
its extension and the improvement of the human condition.   They  
don't even support sex education to lower the number of abortions  
that they rail so much against.   I have no use for these  
hypocritical vicious creatures.

- samantha