[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

[Brent Allsop]

Transhumanists,

There is always going to be some small minority set of non expert
transhumanism that advocate coercion, even of the military type.  The
huge anti transhumanist types are always going to way amplify and
believe all that and lump us all in the same bucket, beyond anything
we can counter, alone.

The best way to fight this is to have explicit signed survey
declarations, of the majority of expert transhumanists, so nobody can
doubt that any “coercive transhumanists” are only a few uneducated
extremists the majority of expert transhumanists repudiate.

The very goal of canonizer.com, is to find out what EVERYONE,
including people that are still Luddites, wants, concisely and
quantitatively.  The more diversity the better.  As many transhumanist
as possible should point out that our goal is to first find out what
everyone wants, and have all of that as our goal, never forcing or
denying any of it for anyone.

Brent Allsop




On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 11:21 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> Joseph Bloch wrote:
>>
>> An interesting article by Ron Bailey over at Reason, concerning his
>> debate with Peter Lawler last week:
>>
>> http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/18/transhumanism-vs-bioconservati
>>
>
> Similar themes came up in my debate yesterday evening at the Manchester
> University student union, where I was debating David king from Human
> Genetics Alert. He argued (from a pretty leftist standpoint) that
> enhancement embodies the ideal of capitalism and since capitalism is bad for
> human value and diversity hence most enhancement is bad. As he saw it,
> western liberal individualism promotes uniformization in respect to the
> market. I argued that the fact that his claim already disproves itself: we
> live in a society where diversity is highly valued - if it wasn't we
> couldn't care less if enhancement reduced it. The coerciveness of
> enhancement is like the coerciveness of fitting into existing culture: there
> are plenty of things to be concerned with, but we do have plenty of freedom
> *in liberal individualistic open societies* to try to change them.
>
> Best line from King: "You can tell that the previous two speakers are
> bioethicists, since they were constantly using the word 'we'" - he has a
> point. Ethicists tend to assume there is a big set of ethical humans who we
> all belong to who try to act right. King seemed to assume that most problems
> were due to an unseen 'they' group responsible for most bad things, but
> conveniently forgot that his own reasoning suggested most of the problems he
> saw with enhancement was due to the social organisation of society - us.
>
> Now off to London to talk ethics of brain interfaces and do a BBC interview
> on enhancers... ah, the life of the jetset (or rather, train-set)
> bioethicist! ;-)
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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