[ExI] Reframing transhumanism as good vs. evil

[Stefano Vaj]

2011/1/20 Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com>:
> An additional, easy retort is that *medicine itself* has never been
> perfectly orthodox from a utiitarian POV nor "sustainable" by any means. At
> any given time, more human lives and suffering would have been spared by
> reallocating globally the resources devoted to medical research, and to
> actual day-by-day medicine for that matter, to some other end, such as
> feeding the hungry, increasing safety, etc.
>
> Prove it.

How much money is required to save ten children in Africa from death
by hunger? How much for a heart transplant? The arithmetics seems easy
enough.

But even within medicine itself, traditional, time-honoured ethical
rules which provides for doing first everything of anything for the
patient at hand sharply collide with a utilitarian point of view,
which might require that scalpel be dropped during surgery should the
physician's attention would be more productive in terms of general
happiness if devoted instead to the five new cases in the anteroom.

-- 
Stefano Vaj