[ExI] The meaning of life (in transhumanism)

[Anders Sandberg]

William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> , 23/2/2014 2:43 AM:
We are born human.  This is our group and we try to stay in it, most of us, support our group, and try to love our fellow humans.  We also try to contribute to it and improve it in some ways.  The least we can do is use our talents to do our duty to ourselves, our families, and ultimately our race. 
In the law a duty is paired with a right.  Society has a right to expect us to perform as above - to do our duties.
 
 I think that "He was a dutiful person" is a great epitaph.   bill

In ethics duties are what you ought to do. Depending on moral system they may be all over the place, but once you decided that system X is true, it follows logically that you ought to do (or not do) certain things. And you should want to do this, since the whole idea of morality is that it is about what is good to do. In practice we are of course psychologically not terribly good at this, so the epitaph is a good one.
I am not convinced that "society has a right" makes sense from an ethical perspective. Society is not a moral agent. If I do not vote I might be remiss in my democratic duties, but there doesn't seem to be an entity that could feel *morally* infringed upon in the same way as if I did not repay a loan. Sometimes we have a moral duty to not do a social duty, for example not obeying or enforcing unjust laws. This of course goes back to the question of what the heck the social contract actually is, whether groups can be said to be morally relevant entities and the sticky question of what a right really is.
Do we have moral duties to our species? A lot of the utilitarians and consequentialists around here think so. To them happiness and well-being (suitably defined) is the ultimate value, and the more the better. This makes existential risk something very bad since it cuts off nearly all future value, and making sure (post)humanity spreads and thrives is a way of getting way more value into the universe. Yes, aliens, animals and maybe AIs count too: it is a very general duty to make value-holding life spread and thrive rather than just humans.
I think one can make a Kantian version of this by arguing that moral agents have value (being ends rather than means) and that we have a duty to help them. We should act to preserve our species since this is a self-consistent moral maxim. But it is less clear that this leads to duties to help enhance humanity, since this kind of value is rather binary. 
Besides the duties there are the virtues. A virtue ethicist may culture the virtue of caring about humans and helping them evolve. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

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