[ExI] Reframing transhumanism as good vs. evil

[Anders Sandberg]

BillK wrote:
> If transhumanists advocate utilitarian medical treatment they will be
> outcasts in society and universally hated.
>   

Depends on where you are. In Scandinavian countries utilitarian thinking 
underlies a lot of medicine, and Sweden's most well-known ethicist 
Torbjörn Tännsjö is a fierce utilitarian - and often lectures to the 
medical students in their medical ethics courses. What actually goes on 
is of course that medical ethics is a mixture of systems and approaches, 
and that the utilitarian aspect is tempered by a bunch of other 
deontological considerations.

Utilitarianism is however not the end all of consequentialism, there are 
plenty of more sophisticated forms. Just dropping the calculation of 
utilities and instead looking at more general patterns of consequences 
produces plenty of fairly acceptable systems (like prioritarianism, 
where one should give extra weight to the people in most need). Rule 
consequentialism (act according to rules that have good consequences) 
can approximate deontological ethics to an arbitrary degree.

The real problem is that setting up systems based on a few core 
principles that everything follows from logically is 1) very hard, 2) 
will produce plenty of unforeseen consequences that people dislike 
fiercely. This is true in ethics, in politics (see David Friedman's 
takedown of the idea that one can express libertarianism in a few 
axioms) and in setting up institutions. Besides the historical reasons, 
this is why medical ethics does not work by the government or someone 
else declaring a set of axioms and then the doctors implement them 
logically. The actual practice is much more like how laws are built from 
prior rulings in a common law system - messy, complex, updateable and 
influenced by many institutional pressures. We might wish to improve on 
this, but that means getting our hands dirty in politics, debates and 
stakeholder meetings.

I think the transhumanist goal ought to be to establish a bunch of our 
concepts as valid and relevant: morphological freedom, Freita's 
volitional normative health concept, and enhancement as a valid medical 
pursuit.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
James Martin 21st Century School 
Philosophy Faculty 
Oxford University