[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

[Anders Sandberg]

Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 24 October 2011 10:56, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se 
> <mailto:anders at aleph.se>> wrote:
>
>     Nobody accepts the "right to remain illiterate" today - children
>     are forced to learn how to read and write, at least partially
>     because otherwise they will be unable to interact with society
>     well as autonomous individuals.
>
>
> I suspect this to be, at least for those who have not abandoned the 
> idea of popular sovereignties, a matter of *collective* freedoms, such 
> as the ones pertaining to the freedom of a given society to give 
> itself the legal system of its choice, which necessarily embodies 
> certain arbitrary values which, without requiring any universalist 
> foundation at all, can well be specific to that society's choices.

The motivations for mandatory schooling are a mixed lot, with plenty of 
weak arguments. But the autonomy argument does have some strength: if 
you lack the resources to participate in the cooperative core of your 
society, your options become severely restricted. This has always been 
true, but becomes more obvious in complex societies where you need many 
skills that are not trivial to acquire on your own. This seems to be a 
fairly universalist motivation to why it might be legitimate to make 
everyone literate.

It is society- and tech-dependent in the sense of what skills are 
important, but if one accepts the (universalist) idea that all people 
have a right to try to live a life that is as free and meaningful as 
possible, then there may be something that has to be provided by others 
in order to enable bootstrapping into a fully functioning autonomous 
citizen. We cannot assume nature or the parents have (or are able to) 
provide these resources.



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
Oxford Martin School 
Faculty of Philosophy 
Oxford University