[ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2015-11-15 21:51, spike wrote:
> Anders, somewhere in the discussion of ethics on this activity we 
> should see someone mention externalizing risk onto society.
Yup. That seems to be a natural limitation of enhancement. If I enhance 
myself but it makes everybody unsafe, it is not a good enhancement. Then 
again, state responses to enhancement may also be causing externalized 
risks that are not on par with the benefit (the war on drugs is a good 
example).

> In the creation of designer babies, it is hard to deny that we 
> externalize risk onto society, for if it goes really wrong in 
> unforeseen ways, the parents would exhaust their own resources with 
> plenty of big expenses left afterwards. 

Designer babies are an issue where my current morphological freedom 
framework has trouble. I like Julian Savulescu's Principle of 
Procreative Beneficence, but how to balance it with risk is something I 
don't know how to do properly.

> On the other hand, it is unclear the federal government has the 
> authority to prohibit experimentation of this kind. States can, but at 
> least some will not.

In many legal systems the state actually claims implicit ownership over 
citizen bodies. Committing mayhem has sometimes been regarded as an 
offence against the state, by depriving it of an able body.

A more modern interpretation is applying the harm principle: some 
experimentation is not allowed because it infringes on the rights of the 
child. Some philosophical arguments here about pre-persons and who the 
right-infringed child actually are (the child that would have been born, 
or the one that actually is born?)
//


-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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