[ExI] Medical power of attorney for cryonicsts

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Sat Dec 6 21:39:39 UTC 2014


I think it's pretty clear there is a intuitive feeling among all human
beings (except for psychopaths) that some acts are moral and others are
not, but as the trolley problem makes clear this universal feeling that I
have as strongly as you is not logically self consistent, and there is no
reason we should have expected it to be otherwise.  If morality is encoded
in our genes then Evolution invented it, but like all of Evolution's
inventions it need not be perfect all of the time, it just has to be
slightly better than the competition most of the time.

So the specific skill set that smart people have that dumb people lack,
the ability to see patterns and use logic to make grand structures from a
few simple starting points, will be of limited value in questions of
morality. If there is no consistent moral thread because none exists then a
dumb ethicists will be about as good at his profession as a smart one. As
for medical ethicists, you'd need smarts to handle the medical part but not
the ethical part.

  John K Clark
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