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On 2016-09-28 17:53, William Flynn Wallace wrote:<br>
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style="font-size:14pt;font-family:calibri,sans-serif"> OK
- now can we return to the question that started
this? From Anders post I assume he thinks that any
good done by genetic meddling is OK. Is that it?
When you become aware of what was done to you by the
gengineers you are just thankful because they created
you as good as you could be with the genes you were
given and those that they reprogrammed, were donated
by someone else and so on, are OK too?</span></p>
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Maybe. But there is a difference between having longevity genes and
having green skin. Even if being green-skinned in a sense is part of
who you have grown up to be, it is not a general purpose good: it is
useful for some life projects but bad for others. So while you may
be thankful for being who you are, you have less reason to be
thankful for the particular enhancement. This gets more extreme the
more narrow the enhancements are.<br>
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ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span
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roman",serif"><span
style="font-size:14pt;font-family:calibri,sans-serif">I
remember from Heinlein's Friday ("My mother was a test
tube") that being a hybrid of sorts and not 'natural'
was looked down on. You were a second class citizen.
Was Heinlein simply wrong about people's reactions to
not being 'natural'?</span></p>
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People value naturalness differently based on culture. One can
imagine strains of our culture looking down on "hybrids" and strains
regarding them with envy. In fact, both concerns show up when people
try to formulate arguments against genetic enhancement. The
conclusion is that it is an empirical question and one cannot base
an ethical argument on it; a better use of ethicist effort is to
create the right conditions for just treatment of people. <br>
<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University</pre>
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