[ExI] Iain M Banks' Culture Novels [WAS Re: Usages of the term libertarianism]

[Stefano Vaj]

On 22 May 2011 04:19, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:

> My own position is that this question -- whether someone would be a slave
> if they were genuinely and completely designed to want to do something that
> happened to benefit the designer -- is one of the easier philosphical
> questions to answer.  And the answer is "no".  Only if there were some sense
> in which the creature "really" wanted to do something else, so that they
> exzperienced any measure of frustration and unfulfillment, would there be a
> slavery situation.
>

Yes and no. It makes me think of The Island. Let us say that we choose to
undergo the unbelievable waste of creating and grow full-fledged,
articulate, even literate clones of ourselves in order to harvest organs
from them through letal surgery. As long as they are deliberately programmed
to *wish* such an outcome, they should be considered as "free"?

If the answer is yes, it would seem easy enough to push the concept a little
further and imagine that the citizens of Huxley's Brave New World are in
fact free because they are actually selected, altered and conditioned to be
happy of their lot, whichever it may be.

One step again, and what has ever been slavery itself if not a legal,
cultural, educational context aimed at "designing" humans for serfdom? The
problem with it would only have to do with its possible failing.

Now, I submit that there are more crucial problems with slavery, the least
of which are those of a "moral" nature. In fact, I suspect with Nietzsche
that slave masters and large-scale slavery-based societies end up almost by
definition as stagnant, complacent, and innovation-averse, and ultimately
are invariably defeated by societies where self-programming remains more
important than having something else which allows us in the short term to
spare the effort, the Roman empire of the decadence and the American
confederacy being cases in point.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110522/70e56304/attachment.html>