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On 2015-10-05 20:02, Dan TheBookMan wrote:<br>
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<div>On Oct 5, 2558 BE, at 9:09 AM, William Flynn Wallace <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com">foozler83@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:</div>
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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.<br>
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<div>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?</div>
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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 (
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.smatthewliao.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/HEandClimateChange.pdf">http://www.smatthewliao.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/HEandClimateChange.pdf</a>
) we may want to enforce these things on *ourselves*. <br>
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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. <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/91/Moral_Enhancement">https://philosophynow.org/issues/91/Moral_Enhancement</a><br>
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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. <br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University</pre>
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