[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 12:56:03PM +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> So did I, but... advocating *compulsory* life extension?!
> 
> This is the weirdest think I have ever heard, and even though I admit that
> they could exist in principle, I have simply never met one, be it just in
> writing.

As a hypothetical, consider self-propagating medical nanoware that stops
death (and suffering, and reverses aging) planet-wide in a few 
days. Now many loudly profess they want to die, but natural death is 
hardly informed consent, since opt-in is default, and also
coercive (by way of stepping up suffering or dysphoria until
you 'volunteer'). It's sounds a lot like Stockholm syndrome, 
or a coping mechanism with the inevitable.

Would you deploy such plague of immortality, assuming you could, 
and sort out the yes-I-really-do-want-to-die-yes-means-yes hardcore
cases after the smoke clears? And where would intervention stop
and modification begin, say in case of clinical depression or
apotemnophilia (fixing body image maps is easy)? Ugh.

I must admit I would do that, provided the issue of euthanasia
would be solved in a given time span, a few months or so.

Now many would call that evil, but evil is not an absolute metric.
There is no easy moral calculus, though utilitarianism hints at one.
I must admit I would ask for forgiveness afterwards instead of
for permission before.

Yes, it's coercive, but it's of limited scope and temporal extent,
and reversible.

(Boy, am I glad this is just a theoretical exercise).
 
> In fact, 98% of transhumanists I know are even in favour of euthanasia, or
> squarely of freedom of suicide.

In case of human cryopreservation euthanasia would be considered part of
palliative care, as it assumes the patient can recover eventually as
state of the art in medicine advances.

It's obvious that truncating suffering makes sense, but less so if you
can eliminate suffering/maximize eudaimonia -- purely theoretical, of 
course, since we can't really do that yet.
 
> And even though I know that many of us are simply "immortalists" in the
> literal sense, what I personally find unbearable and worth fighting against
> is not death per se, is the restriction to my freedom to decide whether to
> live or die, and when, imposed by our current lifespan.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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