[extropy-chat] Transhumanist Ethics

[Matthew Gingell]

Robert,

To whatever extent you are actually interested in an ethical question,
rather than indulging a very nasty personal fantasy, I think it would
serve you well to back off from the particular hypothetical which
started this fuss and try to raise the questions you want to discuss
in precise, value-free terms.

It seems to me you are asking two questions, along with their
combinations and variants:

1.) If it is immoral to take a life by deliberate positive action, is
    it any less immoral to allow a life to be lost by inaction?

2.) If the loss of more lives is worse than the loss of fewer lives,
    is the course of action resulting in fewer deaths, regardless of
    means, always preferable.
    
These are fun questions, the sorts of questions you might bring up
with your clever friends at a dinner party, but the way you raised the
them was the prose equivalent of taking a dump in the punch bowl. 

When you break taboos that way, whether in regard to the public
contemplation of genocide or the the proper place to dispose of feces,
you step out of the realm of abstract intellectual discussion and
plunge head first into screaming monkey affront at the violation of
consensual social reality.

It isn't useful. Please stop doing it.

Now leaving that aside, and taking my deep horror and furious
indignation at your unspeakable savagery as understood, it seems to me
that you are answering no the first question and yes to the second,
and you are puzzled that the implications are counterintuitive.

Let me suggest a different couple of hypotheticals: (I think due to
Peter Singer but I might be confused or misremember.)

For question 1.) 

 You can wade into a river a save a drowning child, but you will ruin
 your brand new $100 suede shows. Is it moral to keep walking to save
 your shoes?

 Somewhere in the world is an identical child will die of starvation,
 but for your $100 donation to a legitimate and well regarded charity.
 Is it moral to take your girlfriend out to dinner and a movie?

For question 2.)

 Three men go to a doctor. One is perfectly healthy, one has a failing
 heart, and one has a failing liver. They are otherwise identical in
 all interesting respects.

 If the doctor does nothing, two men will die. If the doctor kills the
 healthy man and uses him for spare parts, transplanting his heart and
 liver, one man will die. What's the moral course of action? [1]

So there you go. See what you think. Your answers ought to be concise
and principled, and ought to generalize cleanly to the burning of the
topless towers of Ilium / the violent liberation of the European
working man from the tyranny of the bourgeois banker.

Matt

1 - And, totally beside the point, if you didn't know which man you
    were, what would you want him to do?