[ExI] Libertarianism wins again...

[Stefano Vaj]

2011/7/30 Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com>

> You seemed to be making an appeal to self-determination in opposition to
> natrual law theories. I'm stating here, for the record, natural law
> theories, for the most part, have been used to ground self-determination,
> especially individual self-detemrination.
>

Mmhhh. Old debate. Partisans of natural law (Moise, Aristotles, Saint
Thomas, Robespierre) always maintained that an individual is "free" inasmuch
as he is subject to a law which is dictated by God, Nature, Reason, etc.
rathen than by other men (even though in fact it is necessarily proclaimed
and interpreted by other men according to their ends).

Conversely, "free" in a traditional European sense used mostly to mean "not
subject to any external law", such as the law dictated a foreign power or of
a separate caste (including one of self-appointed natural law priests), but
only to that established by the culture, customs and political choices of
the community concerned.

One can raise for rhetorical purposes plenty of usually deprecated
historical examples to advance either stance, but I maintain that the sheer
plurality of models, laws, customs and constitutional systems (some of which
we shall inevitably consider as repugnant from our point of view) gives
transhumanism a better fighting chance.

First, because not all eggs are in the same bag, and some systems are likely
to be more favourable or tolerant to it than others, even impredictably so.

Second, because Darwinian mechanisms amongst them are bound to keep *all* of
them "more honest", effective and "livable" than they would otherwise be,
since blatantly crazy social system are of course more likely to end up
being swept off by imitation of other solutions, external conquest, internal
revolution, people voting with their feet, reform, economic competition,
etc., a consequence which is by no means guaranteed for global governance
solutions or semi-universal creeds.


> Now, if you're going to say all that matters is the transhumanist goal,
> fine. But doesn't that then become your standard and a sort of objective
> means of judging actions? If not, why not? (Here, it just seems to me not
> that you've embraced a sort of consistent ethical relativism -- if that's
> even possible -- but that you've merely adopted transhumanism as your
> standard and believe this resolves all issues and confutes or transcends all
> other views.)
>

There are of course other possible political agendas besides favouring and
promoting posthuman change, not to mention the fact that such change itself
may (and IMHO should) happen in several different direction. And I have of
course mine.

My argument here is simply that starting from what I consider a likely
common ground for most participants to this list, one's favour for "natural
law" philosophies or for global governance mechanisms or for the
globalisation with all means of economic or ethical systems, something that
at first sight might appear neutral with regard to extropian views, may in
fact represents at the very least a bad strategic bet.

It is not casual in fact that "natural law" arguments and international,
worldwide regulations in allegedly dutiful compliance thereto, are the
obsession of most anti-transhumanists. They know only too well that unless
repression can be maintained at a global level, an unraveling effect risks
to take place forcing neoluddite or even "precautionary" systems to align,
simply in order to survive.

Now, once you accept that a natural law exists, and that every community and
political entity must be subject to the same set of rules, you might still
in theory succeed in arguing that "natural law" provides for free access to
technologies, freedom of research, freedom of change, etc. But if you lose
this battle, as it appears not so unlikely, you end up losing everything. If
you, on the other hand, defend the freedom of each community, and of your
own in the first place, to live as it likes, you also defend your
probability of finding yourself at least in a position to look somewhere for
a group of similarly-minded people...

 Since no one is shy of tossing around book references here, I wonder how
> you would answer some of the criticisms of this view in Mark Schroeder's
> _Noncognitivism in Ethics_.
>

Let us just say that "noncognitivism in ethics" is a not really a
renounceable position for me... :)

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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