[ExI] Medical power of attorney for cryonicsts

[Anders Sandberg]

John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> , 5/12/2014 6:06 PM:


On Thu, Dec 4, 2014  spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>> but If you want advice a organic chemist would be much more useful than a ethicists. 

> On the contrary sir.  An organic chemist is useless to me, until I can be comfortable that what I am thinking about doing here is morally justifiable.

The entire point of morality is to maximize happiness, otherwise there is no point in having it at all, so if it works then it's justified, if it doesn't then it's not. 


It is worth noting that you are making a *huge* claim here, but since you think philosophers are useless you don't care that a planeload of very smart people who have worked a lot on ethics think you are wrong or at least jumping to a logically unfounded conclusion. 


One can actually argue that happiness is just a means to an end: a brain module evolved to guide behaviour towards more inclusive fitness. But rather few people think maximizing fitness is the point of morality. And what about other brain modules, could they be the point of morality? If you say happiness is intrinsically worth striving for because that is what it *is* (just as suffering is what we should avoid), then you end up with a rather arbitrary morality since almost anything could make you happy (you could learn to like it, have evolved to be a different kind of creature with different happiness-sources, or somebody might hack your brain). 


Now, I don't disagree with you that much. I am a hedonistic consequentialist, but I do not think it is by any means settled that this is the One True morality. This week I listened to a series of very good lectures by Christine Korsgaard on animal ethics that mostly made total sense, yet were based on a totally non-hedonistic, non-consequentialist approach to what the ultimate goods were. Jumping to conclusions about complicated matters like what really matters is stupid. 





 >I could use the advice of a good medical ethicist

Why? I'm sure they have opinions, most of them contradictory, but what actual facts do they know that you do not?


They have training in reasoning about ethics, the rules and norms surrounding medicine, and how people relate to them. Some are very good at making you see important facets of a medical situation that you would miss by looking merely from your own perspective. 



Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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