[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

[natasha at natasha.cc]

   Brent, who are these "coercive transhumanists".  I don't get it.   
Transhumanism, by its very nature - its defintiion and its philosophy  
- cannot be coercive.  If someone is calling him/herself a  
transhumanist and then proposing we force modificaitons to the bodies  
of others, then they are not transhumanist.  I find it that simple.   
Now, the difficult part is separating ourselves from these people who  
call themselves transhumanists who are not transhumanists.  That I  
think must be addressed.  Since teh H+ symbol is in the public domain,  
anyone can use it.  This means that the transhumaists need to get in  
the middle of the biopolitics discussion and make their voices heard  
without pushing any one political position - socialist, libertarrian  
or otherwise.  This must be outside political fighting and name  
calling and in the larger socio-political arena where the human and  
his/her/its body is his/her/its property to do with it what he/she/it  
wants, unless and until her/her/its actions infringe on the rights of  
another person or his/her/its body.

   Natasha

   Quoting Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at canonizer.com>:

> 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[1]
>>>
>>
>> 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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>
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Links:
------
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/18/transhumanism-vs-bioconservati
[2] http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
[3] http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat


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