[ExI] Moral enhancement

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 1:29 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 2015-10-05 20:02, Dan TheBookMan wrote:
>
> On Oct 5, 2558 BE, at 9:09 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> A final solution:  program our genes with powerful instincts so that we
> simply cannot do anything antihuman.  Take away free will, if you will.  If
> you never had it, you'll never miss it.
>
>
> That's the authoritarian position, no? If people don't meet someone's
> social ideal, then change the people. Why would that ever be a good thing
> to enforce on others?
>
>
> We do enforce it on children and insane people, often for their own good.
> Unfortunately we also do do it for other, bad reasons. And as we argued in
> my most controversial paper (
> http://www.smatthewliao.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/HEandClimateChange.pdf
> ) we may want to enforce these things on *ourselves*.
>
> There has been a discussion in bioethics of moral enhancement for a few
> years (centered around Savulescu and Person's book "Unfit for the Future"):
> given that we are moving towards a world of powerful technologies in the
> hands of most people, it might be necessary for our survival to become more
> ethical and sane. So biomedical moral enhancement, improving people's
> ability to make good moral choices, may be something that should be
> enforced even if the exact choices or moral systems are left to people.
>
> https://philosophynow.org/issues/91/Moral_Enhancement
>
> From a transhumanist standpoint moral enhancement is interesting. When we
> had the discussion about enhanced emotions back around Extro 4, it touched
> on this (long before the outside philosophers crowded in). We can
> distinguish between enhancing the capacities useful for making moral
> behavior (improving our ability to foresee consequences, empathize with
> others, and control ourselves), enhancements of our social structures
> (setting up incentives to be nice, surveillance and reputations to make
> being bad worse), but also the ethical issues of being a moral enhanced
> being - with great power comes great responsibility.
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Oxford University
>
>
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>
>


-- 
Rafal Smigrodzki, MD-PhD
Senior Scientist,
Gencia Corporation
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