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

[Richard Loosemore]

Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 22 May 2011 04:19, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com 
> <mailto: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"?

This is an interesting scenario, but there are elements of it that need 
to be clarified before it can be answered.

You are positing extremely humanlike creatures, I assume?  In that case, 
are you assuming that they behave exactly like us, to the extent that 
they want to get up in the morning, enjoy a good breakfast of toast and 
poached eggs, while having a laugh with the rest of the family about 
some silly story on the radio.....?  But, on top of this, you assume 
that they have this passionate, all-consuming desire to commit suicide 
when asked by the right person (the technician from the organ-bank company).

In this case you have mixed two sets of desires:  you have made 
creatures that have both the desire to enjoy life's pleasures AND the 
desire to kill themselves for us.  If the creatures felt no pain 
whatsover over the thought of being harvested, and the thought of losing 
all of life's other pleasures, and if they would be increasingly 
miserable -- desperately unhappy -- if they were prevented rom realizing 
their life's goal, then it would be immoral to force them to suffer in 
the name of saving them.

However, I suggest that the real answer to your question is that you 
have created an artificial situation of no relevance, specially 
constructed to mix TWO people into one body.  In effect, these creatures 
contain both a hedonist like us, and a harvest-suicider ..... two people 
with two different (and potentially conflicting) sets of desires.

So the difficulty in answering the question is not about whether it is 
ethical to create creatures that genuinely and completely desire to do 
something that is valuable to us, but a question of whether it is 
ethical to create creatures that have mixed motives, in such a way that 
the creature suffers as a result of conflict between the two halves of 
themself.  To that question I answer an emphatic NO.  It is of course 
not ethical to create mixed beings in this way.

In other words, you created a straw man.

But that does not impact the morality of creating creatures that do not 
experience any conflict.

The dung beetle does not want to eat gourmet food -- it likes what it likes.

And, similarly, it would be possible to create entirely non-sentient 
creatures that produced organs for donation (something on the level of 
an oyster or jellyfish), so it would be immoral to escew that path in 
order to create fully sentient human beings.

The Minds in the Culture novels, similarly, want to help humans but at 
that same time they are not designed to pursue this goal in such a way 
that they experience any internal suffering as a result.






> 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? 

That is entirely false.

Humans have never been "designed" to want slavery.  It was imposed on a 
creature whose fundamental design was 100% the same as before (desiring 
freedom).  You distort reality here by comparing real slavery to the 
hypothetical situation I proposed.




Richard Loosemore