[ExI] wheelchair driving drunk

[Gregory Lewis]

I agree with this - just noting these norms, not endorsing them. My 
hunch is as medical technology gets progressively better at enhancement 
(especially grey area things like life extension and cosmetics), the 
objections to enhancement will steadily fade, especially for welfare 
goods that have more of a positional component than health 
(intelligence, attractiveness). Imagine a world where instead of mildly 
effective nootropics (e.g. Modafinil) which give you a slight 
advantage, nootropics that can increase your working memory by a factor 
of three, or dramatically improve your conscientiousness for several 
hours, or embryo selection that reliably selects offspring from the top 
percentile of g. I think most will rush to have these things, 
treatment/enhancement be damned.

In fairness, medicating people to by happy, either in residential homes 
or more generally is not straightforward, so medical conservatism 
regarding this is understandable given the tool still aren't great.

Aside: The fact that modern healthcare focuses on health rather than 
wellbeing leads to certain cases of 'metric bias' where public health 
interventions may lower wellbeing: As healthcare looks at 'deaths from 
recreational drug X', or 'incidence of STIs', but not how happy being 
high is or how much fun sex is, it aims to minimize the costs without 
regard to losing the benefit. Even the most cautious would probably 
accept there is some trade-off one should make.

On 29 December 2013 10:33:45, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On 2013-12-28 20:40, Gregory Lewis wrote:
>> I'm a doctor. Pretty sure none of this is being contemplated by the
>> medical profession, primarily because of the medical norm that
>> nicotine/alcohol/etc. are bad things, and not the things one
>> prescribes to one's patients. Also the related medical norm of the
>> treatment/enhancement distinction: giving stuff to improve patients
>> health is okay, as is stop disease negative effecting wellbeing -
>> giving out drugs to make one feel happier is generally not deemed
>> acceptable.
>
> Yup. But that may just mean we need to change medical norms. I have
> argued (together with Julian Savulescu) that the aim of healthcare
> should be to maximize wellbeing rather than merely health - health is
> instrumentally good for living a good life, i.e. having wellbeing, so
> why not aim straight at the target as far as possible? The treatment
> enhancement distinction of course is of no importance to us.  Of
> course, it is going to take a while to convince people...
>